Everything VLOOKUP does, but simpler and without the fragile column-number trick.
Last lesson ended with a confession: VLOOKUP is powerful but awkwardly designed. You count columns on your fingers, you can never look left, and forgetting one FALSE can put a wrong price on an invoice.
Microsoft agreed. In modern Excel they shipped XLOOKUP, and it fixes every one of those problems.
The shape of it
VLOOKUP asks for a table and a column number. XLOOKUP asks for two columns directly:
=XLOOKUP(what to find, the column to search, the column to bring back)
Using Rahul's price list from last lesson (products in F, prices in H):
=XLOOKUP(A2, $F$2:$F$4, $H$2:$H$4)
Read it aloud: "Find whatever is in A2 in column F, and bring me back the matching thing from column H." No table. No counting. No FALSE — XLOOKUP does exact matching by default, which is what you wanted all along.
Why pointing beats counting
Here's the quiet superpower. Imagine a colleague inserts a new "Supplier" column between Category and Price in the price list.
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