vlookup in reverse search direction

[Curious]

One sheet has a huge customer data table with thousands of records.
The second sheet has dozens of customer records. I need to vlookup
from the second sheet for sales rep names, using the customer names as
matching criteria.

The problem is that some sales rep's names, which associate the
customer names, have been changed over years. Because vlookup always
gives me the first occurance of a customer name (and a rep's name),
from the table top to the table bottom, I sometimes get a wrong/old
rep name.

Is it possible that vlookup searchs the last record first, and move
up? Or is there a better approach for my purpose?

Thanks in advance.

HZ

 

[Tim]

Why don't you just sort the data in the reverse direction ?

Tim

 

[Greg Glynn]

I've found VLOOKUP only to be reliable when the lookup table is sorted
prior to the lookup (giving the same result as you mentioned).

If I understand your problem, your REP table needs to be sorted before
the VLOOPUP with work correctly.