Office 365 has officially added the XLOOKUP function for Excel

After a long period of testing, today Microsoft officially announced that Excel's new XLOOKUP function is now available for Office 365 users.

XLOOKUP was first announced in August 2019 as an alternative to VLOOKUP, promising to bring improvements and drastic changes to one of the most popular Excel calculation functions. Last November, Microsoft announced that XLOOKUP is being actively tested with Office Insiders, and so far, it can be confirmed that the test has completed as planned.

Although introduced as a successor to VLOOKUP, but in fact XLOOKUP can also be used instead of HLOOKUP, because it is the perfect combination and sum between the main features of both functions. . In other words, you can use XLOOKUP to search for values ​​both vertically and horizontally on a spreadsheet.

Not stopping there, XLOOKUP can also find the values ​​on the left of the cell where you insert the function, helping you not to be restricted to previously used functions. This is a nice improvement because, as we all know, the limitation of VLOOKUP is that the result returned by the function can only be one column to the right of the first column in the table, similar to HLOOKUP, It is also possible to return only a single row below the first row in the lookup table, and these restrictions can sometimes be difficult for users. In addition, XLOOKUP also supports insert and delete columns, so the changes you make to your spreadsheet will not affect the results.

If you still want to use the old VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP functions, use them as usual because these functions are still available, at least for the time being. However, Microsoft encourages users to take the time to learn, get acquainted, and then switch to using the new XLOOKUP function simply because it is faster and more effective.

TipsMake has an article on how to use XLOOKUP function, please refer: