Select a Word, Get a Number in Google Sheets with a VLOOKUP Table
Learn how to use a dropdown menu and VLOOKUP function in Google Sheets to select an exercise and automatically retrieve the corresponding calories burned per hour. This tutorial simplifies the process into three easy steps for efficient tracking of your daily activities.
So you wanna select the word and get a number . In this particular case, we want to enter an exercise we do each day and get calories per hour here based on what that exercise is. And then we can do some more calculations , maybe by how much time we actually spent doing that. But we want to get the exercise and get the calories per hour. So let's do this in three steps. One, we're gonna create a dropdown menu. Then we're going to create a VLOOKUP table . Then we're gonna actually do the V lookup in calories per hour. So let's start off with the dropdown list, right click dropdown , we'll add another item, some yoga here. So we have in B two, this dropdown list that we can select a word. Let's copy paste that for each day. And we'll select a few running, cycling, and yoga. And now we're gonna create a VLOOKUP table.
We're gonna go exercise calories per hour, so we'll type in running, cycling, yoga and add our calories 300. 2 50, 1 20 based on whatever we wanna do. Now, let's create a VLOOKUP function . V lookup equals V lookup. Search key is going to be B two comma range is going to be where we have our table . We can select more rows just in case we add to this later. Now, the key here is we want to put a dollar sign in from the one and the eight or whatever. Uh. Row numbers there are here. Now the index, this is going to be based on where we want to get the information from. Our search key is always gonna look in the first column, column number one.
So we want to look in index two or the second column, or just put a number two here. And as it's sorted, I like to always put false just to say it's not sorted, just in case. Now we have our V lookup. We can copy paste all the way down. We can see there's an NA here. This NA says, Hey, we didn't find this value. Well, we can wrap around V lookup if na, and say, well, if you don't find anything, put a comma. And let's put in quotes, a little message that says, enter exercise. And now let's copy paste this all the way down and we can see which ones we still have to enter. Let's put in running and immediately it turns into the number that we want. Isn't that cool? You are watching better sheets here on YouTube.
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