VLOOKUP data in excel and return associated value.

It's not clear exactly what you're looking for, do you want to return all references for all warning States? Or are you wanting to look up a Process and return the reference if the State is "warning"?

Try:

=VLOOKUP("WARNING",B:C,2,FALSE)

where data is in A:C

What if there are two rows with WARNING, like you have for WAITING or OK.  This formula extracts first match only.

If your data is in columns A, B, C then the formula should be

=vlookup("WARNING",B:C,2,0)

This will give the result for only the first warning in the column

Thanks I will give this a go, as for the comments in this scenario there will only ever be one warning at a time so this solution should work. Also I forgot to mention this formula should reference a different worksheet named 'Overview'. So I guess...


=VLOOKUP("WARNING",Overview!B:C,2,FALSE)

I will give this a go...

When I try the above I get a Bad name or workbook open error message? This may be my fault as in the data the 'STATE' column is in column F and the REFERENCE column is in column I. I excluded these before for brevity... I amended the formulas above to suit this structure as follows...

=VLOOKUP("WARNING",Overview!F:I,4,FALSE)

Does it work with that new configuration?

Make sure that the WARNING is in column F

Check the spelling of Overview. Even leading/trailing spaces do matter.

Unfortunately not. This looks to be a context thing, if I take the amended formula into the spreadsheet and run from there it works as expected... The formula being...

=VLOOKUP("WARNING",Overview!F:I,4,FALSE)

But I am using the formula as part of a web data query and am using the formula to populate a parameter... Perhaps there are different rules here as to the formulas that can be used?

Full error is...

Could not obtain parameter from reference (Bad name or workbook not open). Proceed to prompt for value?

So you are typing that formula into a cell or trying to put it somewhere else?  Maybe you have downloaded some invisible characters from the web.

You may have to use the CLEAN function on column F, in another column, then copy/paste special values back to F, to get rid of them, then retry the VLOOKUP.  or use Find/Replace and replace 016 (using number pad) with nothing.

The web query path I am using is OK as far as I can tell and returns what I would expect, the formula is had typed so I dont think this is the cause?

So how exactly are you implementing the formula?  I am not sure I follow.

Ok,

I have imported data using an excel web query which imports tabular data from an online source. I have added a parameter to this query so that I can configure the actual web query parameters used each time I refresh the data - at present every time I refresh the data a prompt shows asking me to manually input the data (which all works OK).

However one of the options for this is instead of inputting the data manually I want to use a web query formula to lookup the data from an existing cell? Does that help, any questions fire away,

Yep worked like a charm, a bit annoying I could not do it by using the formula directly but if it works I am happy. Thanks for your time.