VLookup with empty cells - excel

Question

Here are my 2 columns
A B
Spain [EMPTY]
France Euros
Spain Euros
In another cell, I would like to write a formula that would write the currency of each country. like if I have:
C1=Spain, C2=France,
I would want to have
D1=Euros, D2=Euros.
I tried it with VLOOKUP, but it gave me
C1=[Empty], C2=Euros
Thank you very much for your time

Answer 1

As others have commented, VLOOKUP will return the first match it finds, thats why you get [EMPTY] for Spain.
You can work around this by adding an intermediate column. Lets assume you insert a column B with formula =IF(C1="","",A1) and copy down for all used rows.
Column D is Spain, France etc
Column E is now =VLOOKUP(D1,B:C,2,0)

Answer 2

IF you can SORT your columns, sort by Column A then by B descending (Z-A) then use the vlookup you're trying to use. THis will put the country with a value 1st so V-Lookup will return a vale instead of empty. When empty is returned, its becuase EVERY single instance of that entry in column A has an empty value. However if the entry in A has Multiple values, it will pick the first from descending order.
So do you have situations in which a entry in column A has multiple values beyond 1 currency and a blank entry?
However this has a pitfall in that the Order now matters so if data is added to this spreadsheet a reorder must occur each time.

Answer 3

I'm more a VBA than formula guy but this (horrible!) array formula will return the first non blank match
in D1 put
=IF(MAX(IF(--(A$1:A$6=C1)*LEN(B$1:B$6)>0,ROW(A$1:A$6),0))>0,INDEX(B$1:B$6,MAX(IF(--(A$1:A$6=C1)*LEN(B$1:B$6)>0,ROW(A$1:A$6),0))),"no match")
and press Shift - Ctrl - Enter together
how it works
IF(--(A$1:A$6=C1)*LEN(B$1:B$6)>0,ROW(A$1:A$6),0)) checks that A1 matches each of A1 to A6, and correspondingly whether B1 to B6 is non-empty.
If both these conditions are TRUE then the row number of these matches is placed in an array, if FALSE the formula returns zero. so the first array id {0,0,3,0,0,0}
If the MAX of this array is not zero then the formula returns this cell position from the B column using INDEX in INDEX(B$1:B$6,MAX(IF(--(A$1:A$6=C1)*LEN(B$1:B$6)>0,ROW(A$1:A$6),0)))
Else there is "no match"
I will shoot this to a formula genius called Barry Houdini to see how much he can shorten it
Enlarged sample (including a true blank result) below

Answer 4

I feel like a fraud here.....don't ask me any VBA questions!
I note that use of MAX actually means that your formula (and chris' amended version) actually gives the last non-blank match. You can also do that with a non-CSE LOOKUP formula, i.e.
=LOOKUP(2,1/(B$2:B$6<>"")/(A$2:A$6=C1),B$2:B$6)
which will return #N/A if there's no match
for the text "no match" instead then, assuming formula returns text values you can use 2003 compatible
=LOOKUP("zzz",IF({1,0},"No match",LOOKUP(2,1/(B$2:B$6<>"")/(A$2:A$6=C1),B$2:B$6)))
For first non-blank match you can use INDEX/MATCH in a similar way, i.e.
=INDEX(B$2:B$6,MATCH(1,(B$2:B$6<>"")*(A$2:A$6=C1),0))
confirmed with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER