Question

I’m doing a hlookup against a value that spans multiple columns. My data is similar to this:

      A      B      C      D    ---------------------------   1|       Col1          Col2 2|     x      y      z      w 3| 4| 

In rows 3 and 4 (A3, B3, C3, D3, etc.), I’d like to put formulas that will do an hlookup somewhere else in the workbook. The trick is, I’d like it to look up ‘Col1’ for columns A and B and ‘Col2’ for columns C and D. ‘Col1’ is in A1, but is really A1 and B1 merged. When I reference A1, ‘Col1’ appears, but when I reference B1, the return value is blank.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

To get access to the ‘Col1’ and ‘Col2’ labels, you can use the following:

=INDEX($1:$1,1,COLUMN()-MOD(COLUMN()-1,2))

Note: This assumes that you are grouping together the same number of cells. If it were three cells, you would just change the last number in the formula to a 3, and so on.

Edit: Here’s how it works:

INDEX($1:$1,1, x ) returns the value of the cell in row 1, column x. If your table is not actually located in the top left corner of the worksheet, you can change this to the actual range that includes all of your merged labels. In this case, it would be: INDEX($A$1:$D$1,1, x )

COLUMN() returns the column number of the current cell (1 in column A, 2 in column B, etc.)

MOD(COLUMN()-1,x) returns an offset from the current column to the column that holds the proper label