Frequently Asked Questions

Excel Cookbook is a free website that publishes practical Excel guides, formula walkthroughs, and troubleshooting articles built around real spreadsheet tasks.

It is for anyone who uses Excel for work, study, or reporting. Some guides are beginner-friendly, while others focus on more advanced lookup, array, and reporting workflows.

Yes. The guides, examples, and browsing tools on Excel Cookbook are free to access.

Microsoft documentation explains product behavior. Excel Cookbook focuses more on practical use cases, common mistakes, and examples that are easier to adapt to real spreadsheets.

Common causes include extra spaces, text-number mismatches, missing values, or using approximate match when you need exact match. Checking data type consistency and match mode usually solves it.

If your Excel version supports XLOOKUP, usually yes. It is more flexible, handles exact matches more cleanly, and can return values from either direction.

That often happens because numbers are stored as text, criteria ranges are mismatched, dates are not real Excel dates, or spaces are hiding in the source data.

Many core formulas work similarly, but compatibility varies. Functions such as XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA, and some newer dynamic array features may behave differently or be unavailable.

Guides are reviewed and updated when examples need clarification, errors are reported, or stronger coverage is needed for an important Excel topic.

Yes. Use the contact page to suggest a guide, report a mistake, or ask for a clearer explanation of a specific formula problem.