Question

I have an excel sheet A in which I clicked on a dropdown icon in a cell and the list of all the people in another data excel sheet B which I referenced to appears. In that data excel sheet B, each row is unique to each person with attributes of that particular person like identification number.

So when I clicked on the cell and selected a name from the dropdown list, I want the next cell to show the identification number of selected name. How do I go about doing that? I have no idea how to start.

Answer 1

Try combining Index and Match to achieve the reults you’re looking for.

This way you dont hit the vlookup limitation of only being able to return values to the right of the lookup.

=Index(SheetB!A:A,Match(SheetA!A1,SheetB!B:B,0))

Assumed:

• Sheet A’s dropdown is in cell A1
  • Dropdown’s Value needs to be looked up in column B of ‘Sheet B’
• We want the corresponding value from column A of the lookup in Sheet B to be returned.

Update the formula references, and this should get you on the right track.