can you use wildcards with vlookup?

Question

i would like to do a vlookup, but i would like it to match the SUBSET of a cell. is this possible?

for example, if i am looking for "alex is smart" and the cell has "alex is smart blah blah", i want it to match on alex is smart

is this possible?

Answer 1

You can use wildcards in the lookup value argument. If cell A1 contains the text "alex is smart" you can use:

=VLOOKUP("*"& A1 &"*",A2:B3,2,FALSE)

You can also hard-code the lookup value like:

=VLOOKUP("*alex is smart*",A2:B3,2,FALSE)