Performing a vlookup function in Google Sheets is pretty easy to do once you’ve had a couple of practices.

A vlookup allows you to lookup data from one peace of data with the data you’re working on by searching for key pieces of data that possibly match.

For example, you may have been given a job by your manager where you have a spreadsheet full of the products the company sells. Perhaps on the data you’ve been given it has the prices for the current year, but the manager wants to see how much they’ve increased from the year before.

Instead of going through each product individually, you could check to see if you can get a download from the system where your products and historic prices are stored. It’s highly likely you could get your hands on a CSV file, which you can import into your spreadsheet on a separate tab to where your current data is placed.

Providing the data from both sources contains a field where the data matches, you can perform a vlookup. The good news is most companies understand the importance of having a key index field. An example would be a product code.

This is when you would perform a vlookup, so you can easily add the data from one data source to another.