Welcome to the 29th Easy Excel tutorial. Today I show you the Index / Match functions. The index match function is actually a combination of two separate functions. I believe that in order to fully grasp what they can do together, you must first know what they do individually.

I cover both functions separately and show you the power they provide you when combined!

The Index function is actually very easy. It returns the value at an intersection of a column and row. That's all really. The first parameter is the column we're looking at, this is what the function will extract and output, and t he second parameter is the row number which we input. Let's practice a very simply.

Match is also pretty easy by itself. It takes two main parameters. The first is the lookup value, and the second is the lookup array. It takes that information and tells you which row it's on. It's not going to return a value like 10%, but it'll say it's on row 1, or row 3). It also takes an optional third parameter which determines if it's an exact or approximate lookup. The reason this is sometimes better than vlookup is that it allows you to select both less than and greater than values! By default, it's 1. Which means it's looking for an approximate value less than the lookup value.

Remember to checkout the Resources section below for associated downloadable content, JSFiddle links, and other resources. Watch the video and follow along!