When you have a table with data, and you wish to retrieve specific information from it.

Actually whenever you are looking up a name in a phone book, you are performing a “real” vlookup action: you look up the name of your recipient on the first (most left) column, and when finding it, you retrieve the number appearing next to that name.

An implementation of the vlookup in Excel could be:
You have an Excel table with student names and their grades.
You wish that you could somewhere in the sheet type a student name, and immediately retrieve his grade (based on the data in the table).
To achieve this, you can use "Vlookup": the function will look for the student’s name in the first column in the table, and will retrieve the information that is next to his name in the second column (which is his grade).

Check the video links above to learn how exactly the vlookup function is written and implemented inside the worksheet.

Another example:
You have a big table consisting thousands of bank accounts.
You wish to retrieve in another worksheet information regarding some specific accounts.
To achieve this, you can type these specific account numbers, and put a Vlookup function next each one of them. The function will look for the account numbers in the big table, and retrieve relevant information from it.

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