=MATCH() equivalent for multidimensional ranges

Question

I have an excel sheet, where cells A1-C20==INT(RAND()*10). This is my data range. Cell E1=1, E2=2, E3=3, etc. These are the values I am trying to find. I se

Answer 1

You can use COUNTIF to do this since you only want to know whether the number is present (not its location).

=COUNTIF(A:C,E1)>0

This will return "TRUE" if it is present, "FALSE" if it is not.

Just for fun, here's a worksheet function solution that returns the cell address that matches the lookup value. It uses the fact that you are only searching in 3 columns.

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(E1,A:A,0)),IF(ISERROR(MATCH(E1,B:B,0)),IF(ISERROR(MATCH(E1,C:C,0)),"Not found.","C"&MATCH(E1,C:C,0)),"B"&MATCH(E1,B:B,0)),"A"&MATCH(E1,A:A,0))

I thought I'd also throw in a VBA solution that can return the match location inside a (contiguous) range. It looks at columns one at a time from left to right and returns the address of the first match found.

Public Function MDMATCH(srchfor As String, lookin As Range) As String

Application.Volatile
Dim RngArray() As Variant
Dim topleft As String
Dim tmpval As String

topleft = lookin.Address
topleft = Left(topleft, InStr(topleft, ":") - 1)
tmpval = "Not found."
RngArray = lookin

For i = 1 To UBound(RngArray, 2)
    If tmpval = "Not found." Then
        For j = 1 To UBound(RngArray, 1)
            If RngArray(j, i) = srchfor Then
                tmpval = Range(topleft).Offset(j - 1, i - 1).Address
                Exit For
            End If
        Next j
    Else
        Exit For
    End If
Next i
MDMATCH = tmpval
End Function