The one query that I get a lot is – ‘how to compare two columns in Excel?’. This can be done in many different ways, and the method to use will depend on the data structure and what the user wants from it. For example, you may want to compare two columns and find or highlight all the matching. Excel’s VLOOKUP vs INDEX-MATCH Functions. The two formulas return results for the SKU code A101 instead. This is a significant problem, because Excel returns a false result, and that’s dangerous. And we only can return values from within the table array. So if we want to look up a value in one column and return values to the left of.