Last lesson ended with a warning: XLOOKUP only exists in modern Excel. Plenty of offices — and plenty of the older machines a small shop like Rahul's can afford — run Excel 2016 or 2019, where typing XLOOKUP just earns you a #NAME? error.
The classic answer, the one that has worked on every version of Excel for decades, is a team of two small functions: INDEX and MATCH. Each is almost embarrassingly simple on its own. Together they do everything XLOOKUP does.
MATCH — "what position is it at?"
MATCH answers exactly one question: where in this list is the thing I'm looking for?
Using the price list from lesson 1 (products in F2:F4 — Notebook, Pen, Bag):
=MATCH("Pen", F2:F4, 0)
Answer: 2. Pen is the second item in that list. Not the price, not the row number of the sheet — just its position in the list you gave, counting from 1.
The 0 at the end means "exact matches only". It plays precisely the same role FALSE played in VLOOKUP, and skipping it invites the same silent wrong answers. Type the 0 every time.
INDEX — "what is at position N?"
INDEX is the mirror image. Give it a list and a position, and it hands you whatever sits there: