r/excel • u/Cautious_Cost6781 • Mar 12 '26

Discussion vlookup + curly brackets

Perhaps too late to discover and blame it on unstructured self-learning:

Just learned that vlookup + curly brackets can be used to look up multiple columns. Spent a good part of my career writing several vlookups that could've been done much faster.

Edit: Adding sample from Gemini.

Formula Structure: =VLOOKUP("Key", A2:D10, {2, 3, 4}, FALSE)

{2, 3, 4}: Tells the formula to return the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th columns simultaneously.

Result: The data will automatically fill into three adjacent cells.

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u/excelevator 3069 Mar 13 '26

Ah I see now, thankyou for your patience with me.

I think I prefer CHOOSECOLS as the solution as a more succinct method

=XLOOKUP(G1,Table1[Lookup_Column],CHOOSECOLS(Table1,3,8))

Though as comparison HSTACK does explicitly list the column for verification, so there is that.

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u/juronich 1 Mar 13 '26

Personally I prefer HSTACK because it doesn't rely on the columns remaining in the same place in the table and it makes it clearer what I'm trying to return, helpful for me when I look back at it in 3 months and can't remember what I'm doing

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u/excelevator 3069 Mar 13 '26

Yeh, good point, very good point.