Excel Video 175 tackles HLOOKUP. HLOOKUP is very similar to VLOOKUP, so similar in fact that we’ll use the same data from the VLOOKUP videos to discuss HLOOKUP. The difference between VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP literally is the first letter. V stands for Vertical (look in the first column of my data and go right) and H stands for Horizontal (look in the first row of my data and go down). I use VLOOKUP much more often since most of the time that’s how my data is organized, but when your data is in rows instead of columns, HLOOKUP works like a charm.
HLOOKUP has the same structure as VLOOKUP. What am I looking for, where is the table with the data, what row (instead of column) should I look in, and the same TRUE (approximate match) /FALSE (exact match) syntax. When you need to look horizontally instead of vertically through your data, HLOOKUP is what you need.
Last time we added the COLUMN function to help us when we copied VLOOKUP formulas. There’s a ROW function that works the same way when copying HLOOKUP formulas. We’ll work on that next.
