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How to lookup a value and return cell address in Excel?

Author Sun Last modified

In general, you will get the cell value when you use formula to look up a value in Excel. But here I will introduce some formulas to lookup a value and return the relative cell address.

Lookup a value and return cell address with formula

Lookup a value and return cell address with formula

To lookup a value and return corresponding cell address instead of cell value in Excel, you can use the below formulas.

Formula 1 To return the cell absolute reference

For example, you have a range of data as below screenshot shown, and you want to lookup product AA and return the relative cell absolute reference.
a screenshot of the original data range

1. Select a cell and type AA into it, here I type AA into cell A26. See screenshot:
a screenshot of manually entering the value of which you want to return the cell reference

2. Then type this formula =CELL("address",INDEX($A$18:$A$24,MATCH(A26,$A$18:$A$24,1))) in the cell adjacent to cell A26 (the cell you typed AA), then press Shift + Ctrl + Enter keys and you will get the relative cell reference. See screenshot:
a screenshot of using an array formula to return the cell reference of the given value

Tip:

1. In the above formula, A18:A24 is the column range that your lookup value is in, A26 is the lookup value.

2. This formula only can find the first relative cell address which matches the lookup value.

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Formula 2 To return the row number of the cell value in the table

For instance, you have data as below screenshot shown, you want to lookup product BB and return all of its cell addresses in the table.
a screenshot showing the original data range

1. Type BB into a cell, here I type BB into cell A10. See screenshot:
a screenshot of manually entering the value BB of which you want to return the cell reference

2. In the cell adjacent to the cell A10 (the cell you typed BB), type this formula =SMALL(IF($A$10=$A$2:$A$8, ROW($A$2:$A$8)-ROW($A$2)+1), ROW(1:1)), and press Shift + Ctrl + Enter keys, then drag the auto fill handle down to apply this formula until appears #NUM!. see screenshot:
a screenshot showing the row numbers of the given value

3. Then you can delete #NUM!. See screenshot:
a screenshot of deleting the #NUM! error value

Tips:

1. In this formula, A10 indicates the lookup value, and A2: A8 is the column range that your lookup value is in.

2. With this formula, you only can get the row numbers of the relative cells in the table except table header.

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