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An education analyst's grade-band sheet runs the same VLOOKUP-FALSE per row across 50,000 students in production. It's slow — and worse, it fails on every score that isn't exactly 0, 60, 70, 80, or 90, because exact-match lookup can't handle bands.
The right tool for tier banding is INDEX/MATCH with approximate match (match_type = 1). On a sorted threshold column, MATCH does an O(log N) binary search and returns the position of the largest threshold less than or equal to the score — exactly the band-lookup semantics.
The reference at F2:G6 holds the threshold-to-grade map (sorted ascending by threshold):
| Min Score | Grade |
|---|---|
| 0 | F |
| 60 | D |
| 70 | C |
| 80 | B |
| 90 | A |
Eight student scores are in column A.
Your task:
MATCH(..., ..., 1)) so each student's score maps to the correct grade band.Graded cells: B3 (score 72), B5 (score 95), B8 (score 63).