Microsoft Excel is an incredibly powerful tool for managing data. One of its most popular features is the VLOOKUP function, which allows you to look up values from one sheet and display them in another. Knowing how to use the VLOOKUP function efficiently can help you organize data quickly and accurately.

The VLOOKUP function takes four arguments: the value that you want to look up, the range of cells that contain the data to search, the column index of the value that you want to return, and a flag which tells VLOOKUP whether to return an exact or approximate match. It is important to note that the table range should be sorted in ascending order to ensure that the function works correctly.

In addition to the VLOOKUP function, the VALUE function can also be used in Excel to convert text to numbers. The VALUE function takes a single argument, which is the text that you want to convert, and returns the numerical equivalent. This can be especially helpful when dealing with data that contains both text and numbers.

Finally, the UNIQUE function can be used to identify and extract unique values from a range of cells. The UNIQUE function takes a single argument, which is the range of cells that you want to search, and returns an array of the unique values. This can be useful for quickly cleaning up data and removing duplicate values.