What function would you use to look up the meaning of a medical abbreviation in a table?

The VLOOKUP function is specifically designed to search for a value in the first column of a table and return a corresponding value from another column in the same row. When looking up the meaning of a medical abbreviation, VLOOKUP is particularly useful because it allows you to quickly retrieve information based on a specific search term, which in this case would be the abbreviation itself.

For instance, if you have a table with medical abbreviations and their meanings, you could use VLOOKUP to input the abbreviation as your search key. The function would then search for it in the first column of your specified range and return the related meaning from the column to its right. This streamlined process is ideal for looking up data efficiently without needing to navigate through the table manually.

Other functions like INDEX, MATCH, and LOOKUP may assist in retrieving data but do so in different ways that may not specifically cater to the situation of looking up a value based on a column index. INDEX would return a value from a specified position, MATCH would find the position of a value, and LOOKUP could search across columns or rows but does not enforce the structure of a two-column table as effectively as VLOOKUP does in this context.