When you dive into the world of Excel, you quickly realize the power of its functions. Among these, the INDEX & MATCH formulas stand out as incredibly versatile tools for data lookup and retrieval ...

The bigger your spreadsheet, the more you need INDEX and MATCH functions, which you can combine with SUM, AVERAGE, and MAX to refine your searches.

Mastering Excel's index and match functions can streamline data analysis and improve efficiency.

SEE: How to become a developer: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic) Set the match_mode to 2 and you can use the usual Excel ? and * wildcards to specify what to match on.

You use these functions when you want to find values based on the value in a corresponding cell. Thanks to the newish dynamic array function XLOOKUP (), you now have more power and less confusion.