How to use vlookup to return the last value in a table?

For example, my table which I will call Table1 (I have defined this as a name) is added to as new data comes in. How can I use vlookup to retrieve the 2nd column value of the final (last) data point at the bottom of Table1?

Is the first column numerical or text? You can use the range lookup option and search for a value that is going to be greater than any value in your table. If your first column contains words, try:

=VLOOKUP("ZZZZZ", Table1, 2, TRUE)

or, if your first column is a five-digit number, try:

=VLOOKUP("99999", Table1, 2, TRUE)

And it just occurred to me that this will work too, but is slower. Define the first column of Table1 as Table1Col1.

=VLOOKUP(MAX(Table1Col1), Table1, 2, TRUE)

If you want to dynamically update the column you're selecting you can use a MATCH() formula to fill in the col_index_num value. For example:

=VLOOKUP("d", Table1, 2, FALSE)

will return the value in the second column. whereas:

=VLOOKUP("d",Table1[#All],MATCH("value2",Table1[#Headers],0),FALSE)

will return the value in the column whose header is value2. Even more dynamically, you can write it like this:

=VLOOKUP("d", Table1, MATCH(Table1[[#Headers],[value2]],Table1[#Headers],0), FALSE)

which will update automagically if you rename the table column headers