I have a workbook sorted by month, and the spend DETAIL. I need a FORMULA for column j  on  sheet 1 (vlook up I believe) that will find (from the spend detail sheet)  the last purchase price of an item within a 12 month PERIOD, searching by the supplier item field. The spreadsheet is attached here. I am in desperate need of help!


[recovering disk space - old attachment deleted by admin]I suspect you're correct about vlookup being the best FUNCTION to use for this but I'm not very familiar with it. 

Will you need to search for such data from this file frequently?  If not too frequent, perhaps just using a Filter would work.  Using a Filter allows sorting in many ways.  What version of Excel are you using?This is a monthly report, so a filter is not practical for my purposes.I'm gonna take the easy way out of this and give you the results of a Google search on the vlookup function: HTTP://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=vlookup+excel+2007&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest.   I'm sure  you'll find some good references there.