Biff,
That worked perfectly, many thanks. The copy drag worked like magic.
Now for my education, what does the 2,0 at the end of the formula do?
I take it that the $ sign means that those cells should interact with
whatever cells are chosen for the rest of the formula?

Nick

"T. Valko" wrote:

Make the references to the lookup table absolute then just drag copy down
the column as needed.

=C2*VLOOKUP(D2,A$2:B$4,2,0)

As you copy down, the cell references will increment accordingly.


--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Nick" wrote in message
...
Biff,
Thanks, that helps, but I don't know how to make that formula
automatically
work for E3, E4, etc. I need to generalize the formula to look at the
corresponding C and D cells on any given row.

thanks,

Nick



"T. Valko" wrote:

Make it easy!

Create a 2 column table with the product in the left column and the
corresponding price in the right column:

...........A............B
1....Prod........Price
2....item1.......3.50
3....item2.......6.25
4....item3.......1.99

Then:

C2 = quantity = 5
D2 = drop down list with prod names

Formula entered in E2:

=C2*VLOOKUP(D2,A2:B4,2,0)

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Nick" wrote in message
...
I am fairly ignorant of the more complicated aspects of Excel so I hope
I
can
get help with this problem.
I have a sheet with column C for quantity , column D for items and
column
E
for the cost. In column D I defined a drop down list with various
materials
that we sell. I made each item in the list a Name which referred to a
specific value (e.g. safety glasses refers to $3). I want to create a
formula
for each cell in column E which would be the product of column C times
whatever the value represented by the name chosen in column D.
Seems like this should be possible, but I have no idea how. Also I need
to
formula to work on every cell in column E referring to the cells C and
D
in
the same row.

Thanks,

Nick