Vlookup for Airtable?

Lisa_Altizer · ‎Oct 16, 2017

Greetings,

I have an Airtable field titled: Course Status and to the right of that field is Total Enrollment. In my Excel spreadsheet version, I used a vlookup to return the value of ‘course status’

The formula: =VLOOKUP([@Enrolled],Table30,2,FALSE)

Table30
0-2 enrolled = On Standby
3-9 enrolled = Low Enrollment
10-28 = Will Make!

Is there a way to accomplish this in Airtable?

Thanks in advance for your support!

Lisa

Emilio_Lopez_Ro · ‎Oct 19, 2017

Have you tried using a lookup field? It should work perfectly for what you want to do.

Jennifer_Horn · ‎Mar 05, 2018

I also have this problem and it’s not at all clear how to use Lookup to accomplish this.

W_Vann_Hall · ‎Mar 05, 2018

You might want to take a look at this post.

Greg_F · ‎May 16, 2020

Hi,

This was something that I was looking for as well as I needed to do quite a bit of matching between my tables - that were previously using VLOOKUP in Excel. This did not seem to be possible with regular Airtable functions (and I tried a lot of crazy stuff), so I started looking into the Scripting block.
This actually allowed me to make a perfect solution. OK, almost perfect, you still need to change the name of tables and columns manually in the code, but with comments below this should be fairly straight forward.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/gregonarash/f1e8ce0b81141c6b3f4b023ffd6a8027

Airtable simple VLOOKUP style script.js

//Substitute "Orders" for table name which contains values
//on which you want to run the vlookup
let mainTable = base.getTable("Orders");
let mainTableRecords = await mainTable.selectRecordsAsync();

//Substitute "Product" for table which contains range to search in
let lookupTable = base.getTable("Products");
let lookupRangeRecords = await lookupTable.selectRecordsAsync();

//Replace "Item.barcode" with column name which has the values you want to look up

This file has been truncated. show original

I have also made a quick video about it:

I hope that helps!

Onur · ‎May 29, 2020

Continuing the discussion from Vlookup for Airtable?: - This is awesome - exactly what I was looking for. One thing though:
How I can look up if the lookupValue is in a lookup field? (or a formula field that links to another field).
It seems like the cell has no value and therefore the whole lookup runs into nothing.
A way by e.g. extending the code above so that it might solve this, also?
Solution to this is highly appreciated -
Thank you

Onur · ‎May 29, 2020

Another question: how could you define a fallback value (could be a static one “not matched!”) in case that there was no match with the values in the lookup table?

Greg_F · ‎May 29, 2020

I think both cases can be solved with help of "if"conditions. First one checking if the original column/field is empty (in case you have many empty values there). Second case already has a condition that executed when value is found, so it needs to be completed with else statement to execute action if case of not matching values.

Something like this:

Greg_F · ‎May 29, 2020

Here is a link to a sample base with examples:

It should be possible to see the code of blocks once you copy the base (let me know otherwise).

Here is also description of the process on Medium (non-paywalled link)
https://medium.com/@greg.business.automated/vlookup-in-airtable-for-tables-without-existing-links

Onur · ‎May 30, 2020

Hi, - this is great & solves the setting of the “else” value!
The first check if not empty => basically does only what is says (gatekeeper for valid values) - but it does not solve the target:
use the value in the fields to look up.

Or maybe its me having a bug?:
=> Use outcome in formula field in another formula field