Excel 365: How to Find the LAST Matching Value (Not the First) in a List

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Quick gut-check: if the same Order ID, ticket number or SKU shows up more than once in your data — because you log every status change instead of overwriting it — what does VLOOKUP hand you back? Not the current status. The oldest one. Every single time. It’s one of the sneakiest, most common lookup mistakes in Excel, and almost nobody notices it’s happening because the formula never throws an error — it just confidently reports yesterday’s news as today’s truth.

Tiered Commission Formulas in Excel 365: Why VLOOKUP Gets It Wrong

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, real talk: if you’ve ever built a commission plan, a bulk-discount schedule or a tax provision in Excel, you’ve probably written this exact formula — a VLOOKUP against a tier table. It looks confident. It returns a nice, clean number. And that number is quietly, cheerfully wrong, because it slaps one rate on the entire amount instead of giving each slice of it the rate it actually earned. Sales ops, RevOps and finance folks run into this all the time and don’t even notice, because the formula never errors out — it just over- or underpays and smiles about it.

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Excel 365: How to Find the LAST Matching Value (Not the First) in a List

Tiered Commission Formulas in Excel 365: Why VLOOKUP Gets It Wrong