That is unless you parametrise that column index as well - you can do a MATCH to retrieve your desired column number and safeguard it against column insertions/

That is unless you parametrise that column index as well - you can do a MATCH to retrieve your desired column number and safeguard it against column insertions/deletions. (It weakens the case for VLOOKUP, but being quite a light Excel user, this is usually how I do things.)