How to use VLOOKUP (and the FALSE you must not forget)

Look up a value in a table and return a matching value from another column — the workhorse lookup.

The formula

How it works

VLOOKUP takes four things: the value to find (D2 = "banana"), the table to search (A2:B4), which column's value to return counting from the left (2 = the price column), and the match type. It finds "banana" in the first column and returns 20 from column 2. The fourth argument is the one that bites everyone: FALSE (or 0) means exact match and is what you almost always want; TRUE (or leaving it blank) means approximate match and silently returns wrong answers on unsorted data. Two more rules: the lookup value must be in the FIRST column of your table (VLOOKUP can't look left — see vlookup-to-the-left), and the column number is a fixed count, so inserting columns breaks it (INDEX/MATCH or XLOOKUP avoid that).

Verified, not just documented

We ran =VLOOKUP(D2,A2:B4,2,FALSE) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 20 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 20 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.

Functions used

VLOOKUP — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.

Related recipes

• How to VLOOKUP with a partial match (contains)
• How to reference a cell on another sheet
• How to VLOOKUP from another sheet

Related comparisons

• FILTER vs VLOOKUP: return every match, not just the first
• LOOKUP vs VLOOKUP: why the old one still shows up
• VLOOKUP vs HLOOKUP: vertical or horizontal?