Absolute referencing with Excel

- Want to know the most common mistake I see people making in Excel? (bell dings) And how to avoid it? Well, first I'm going to quickly show you what not to do. So, you may be like, alright, alright, Cat, I made this great Vlookup function here and I am just going to copy this thing down. But, Excel is hitting us with one of those pesky error messages. Why? Because when we copied that function down it correctly searched the next name on our list. However, it also pulled our table array down with it. Now, let's meet our hero here, the dollar sign. Now, whenever you see this on the right side of that equal sign I want you to think of it as your lock symbol, meaning it will lock your cell reference into place. So if we want to keep searching from that same table array when we copy our function down all we need to do here is add a dollar sign before our lettered column reference, and our numbered row reference, which changes it from a relative reference to an absolute reference. The shortcut for this on our keyboards is the function F + 4 key. And now when we are copying down this absolute reference it will work just fine.