Originally, Excel was not designed to be a real database. Its early database functions were limited in quantity and in quality. And because every record in an Excel database is visible on the screen ...

An curved arrow pointing right. Once you have mastered VLOOKUP in Excel it's time to move on to INDEX/MATCH. This formula combination gives the same results but without the problems of VLOOKUP.

Slow lookup formulas can kill productivity when working with large datasets. To cope with that, I've tested Excel's optimal lookup functions and their combinations for building lightning-fast formulas ...