Vlookup - doing joins in excel

I've been doing some data analysis in excel (and watching somebody who really knows excel :) one of the useful functions I've learned is vlookup, which basically lets you do a join (like in SQL) ; you pass it the value to find, a range of cells over which to look, an index indicating which column to return and a boolean indicating whether to do exact or approximate matching (usually you pass false, to ask for exact matching, a behavior like SQL)