Struggling with lookup or index

[Maccapacca]

Afternoon,

I'm struggling with Excel lookup or index or sumif. I'd like for excel to look at one cell in one sheet, find it in another then return the value in another

Sheet 1 contains thousands of items of text (boomerangs of all types) that cannot be sorted and is in a non logical excel order.
Sheet 2 contains an extract of a pivot table that has condensed this text to say 25 lines of boomerang types.
Sheet 2 also contains a price for the 25 boomerang types

If I use vlookup it works for most of it then for no reason it'll just point to a cell 6 up. I understand it's because the data isn't sorted alphabetically but I can't do this.

I'd like to select 1 cell in sheet 1 then search through the table of 25 types and return the price next to it.

Please help, will save me days

 

[Tomsk]

MATCH(lookup_value, lookup_array, match_type)
lookup_value : can include wildcards (* for multiple characters, ? for single characters)
lookup_array is a single column, does not need to be sorted
match_type : -1=less than, 0=exact, 1=greater than

 

[james.miller]

Vlookup doesnt need a sorted list if you are looking for an exact match. It only needs to be sorted if you are looking for an approximate match and what the closest match to be returned. For an exact match, the 4th argument in the vlookup statement [RANGE_LOOKUP] needs to be false.

If you need an approximate match instead, then i dont think MATCH will work either as that's bound by the same problems. Might require some VBA. We need more info

 

[Maccapacca]

A kindly old gent helped me out and I ended up with this which worked a treat

=VLOOKUP(R36,Sheet1!$K$7:$L$121,2,FALSE)

My complete misunderstanding of vlookup