Dear experts,

I've inherited a very large set of spreadsheets.
Daily, I get data from other spreadsheets, and paste it into this one.
And, I run database queries, and paste those in too.
Sometimes, we get bad errors, and spend a long time figuring things
out.


The person who wrote them is not here. She used the VLOOKUP
function all over the place.

I've tried a very simple VLOOKUP.

=VLOOKUP(A27, $B$3:$B$262, 1, FALSE)

This means:
take the value in cell a27,
Search through cells b3 to b262
if found, put the value for a27 into the cell.


-----------

But what the other writer did is beyond me. It looks like this:

VLOOKUP($R243,'another worksheet'!$A:$Q,Y$2+8,FALSE)*$W243,

and

VLOOKUP($R243,'Partial ratios'!$A:$O,Y$2,FALSE)*$W243


Just what exactly does this mean???

'another worksheet'!$A:$Q,Y$2+8,
'another worksheet'!$A:$O,Y$2,

What range is it searching?


I am hoping to get answers from people who speak from experience.


Thanks a lot!