Alan Perkins wrote:
I have two suggestions to improve VLookup:
. . .
2. Make the column offset capable of negative values so that you can offset
to the left of the reference column.

If the functions in the freely downloadable file at
http://home.pacbell.net/beban are available to your workbook, you can use

=VLookupLeft

It also allows any column of the lookup array, rather than just the
lefthand column, to be used as the lookup column.

Alan Beban