How Do I Find The Closest Match In Excel?
Struggling to find the nearest match in Excel? Learn how INDEX-MATCH and VLOOKUP can pinpoint the closest value with precision—no guesswork, no confusion.
This Excel video focuses on helping beginners master two powerful functions: INDEX-MATCH and VLOOKUP. In INDEX-MATCH, the formula =MATCH(E5,B5:B9,1) is used to find the closest value in a range (B5:B9) that's less than or equal to a target value (E5), returning its relative position.
Building on this, =INDEX(C5:C9,MATCH(E5,B5:B9,1)) retrieves the corresponding value from another range (C5:C9) based on the position found by MATCH.
The third formula, =VLOOKUP(E5,B5:C9,2,TRUE), introduces VLOOKUP, a vertical lookup function.
It searches for a value (E5) in the first column of a table (B5:C9) and returns a result from the second column.
The TRUE parameter means it finds the nearest match if an exact match isn't available.