Hey Excel IT Pros,

I am trying to clean up a workbook analysis created by someone else. It's slow, it's large, it's not very good.

My question is a VLOOKUP performance question... Right now there are about 10-15 thousand VLOOKUPs on alpha numeric text like this:

10001110Philippines

I've brought in the corresponding ID's for the Regions, concatenated, then in a separate column formatted them as numeric ending up with something like this:

10001110118

 When performing VLOOKUP on such a high scale, will it make a large performance difference using alphanumeric vs. numeric? Should I switch over to INDEX/MATCH method?

Thanks for any advice,

best,

cp  

• Edited by determinism Monday, May 18, 2015 7:29 PM

Hi determinism,

In fact VLOOKUP function in excel is a code which was created by developers of Office. And as the end users we dont know the computational mode and process, we only get the results. So if we wonder to know the different performance between Numeric and Alpha Numeric, we could test this question in our own environment.

And you said INDEX/MATCH functions, they are better alternatives to VLOOKUP. People test these functions, some people said INDEX/MATCH functions is quicker, but some people also said VLOOKUP function is quicker. Different people have different views, I think you should test in your own environment so that you can get the best result.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support