How to optimize vlookup for high search count ? (alternatives to VLOOKUP)

Question

I am looking for alternatives to vlookup, with improved performance within the context of interest.

The context is the following:

• I have a data set of

Answer 1

Switch to Excel 2013 and use Data Model. There you can define a column with unique ID keys in both tables and bind those two tables with relationship in Pivot Table. Than if absolutely necessary you can use Getpivotdata() to fill the first table. I had a ~250K rows table doing vlookup in the similar ~250K rows table. Stopped Excel calculating it after an hour. With Data Model it took less than 10sec.