The combination of INDEX&MATCH is an interesting alternative to VLOOKUP. However, INDEX&MATCH has one major advantage compared to VLOOKUP – the lookup value doesn’t have to be in the leftmost column of the source table.

INDEX is a function, which returns the value located at a given intersection within an array. MATCH returns the relative position of an item within an array. The INDEX function requires the number of the row within a range as an input. And we can find that number with the MATCH function. In other words, MATCH indicates the position of the result, and the INDEX function extracts it.

Some other related topics you might be interested to explore are VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, and HLOOKUP.

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