Excel VLOOKUP gives wrong value

Question

I have a VLookup cell which gives me the wrong value: This is the table:

    PID Product Price   User    User name   Deal On Amount After
in  1001    table   1001    1   Milly   No  1000
in  1001    table   100 13  Vernetta    Yes 900
out 1001    table   50  14  Mireya  No  900
out 1001    table   100 15  Rosanne Yes 1000
out 1001    table   101 16  Belinda No  1000
in  1001    table   200 1   Milly   Yes 800
in  1234    chair   300 2   Charlena    Yes 500
in  1234    chair   100 3   Mina    Yes 400
in  1234    chair   50  4   Sabina  Yes 350
in  8231    couch   20  5   Joni    Yes 330
in  1001    table   150 6   Armando Yes 180
in  1001    table   100 7   Noemi   Yes 80
in  8231    couch   40  8   Ashlie  Yes 40
in  8231    couch   30  9   Ann Yes 10
out 1001    table   201 10  Angelina    Yes 211
out 1234    chair   300 11  Melvina Yes 511
out 8231    couch   21  12  Mattie  Yes 532

The product column is a VLOOKUP with the following formula

VLOOKUP(B6,$L$2:$M$10, 2)

B is the PID column. The table in L2:M10 is the following:

PID Prodcut
1001    table
1234    chair
8231    desk
2311    closet
9182    book_shelf
1822    bed
1938    coffee_book_table
2229    couch

Now as you can see. PID 8231 is a desk, but it appears as a couch. Can you see what the problem is?

Answer 1

The crux of your problem is the way you've written the formula, you forgot the last parameter, "FALSE" or 0 which means you want an EXACT MATCH. So your formula should look like this:

VLOOKUP(B6, $L$2:$M$10, 2, FALSE)

OR

VLOOKUP(B6, $L$2:$M$10, 2, 0)

Both do the same thing.

The default setting for it is TRUE, which looks for the closest match, which you only want if the index you're looking up off of is sorted.