How to make a cell automatically update value based upon information in another cell-CodePudding

I have a spreadsheet used for batching products at work. In column A there are product codes and column B the product description. Is there a way to make column B automatically update based upon the product code in column A?

I tried an IFS( function, but that didn't seem to work and felt like a long winded approach to get the result I desired. Is there another method, perhaps setting up another sheet with all the information in to reference?

CodePudding user response：

A simple example of getting a description based on part of a code:

VLOOKUP(LEFT(A2,1),$A$13:$B$19,2,0)

And using index() with match() based on the same table:

INDEX($B$13:$B$19,MATCH(LEFT(A2,1),$A$13:$A$19,0))