Many people who have used Excel for years still perform lookups using the old-school INDEX-MATCH combo, primarily because it's more flexible than VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP.

Index, Match, and Index Match In Excel, the INDEX function returns an item from a specific position (in a list, table, database).

To extract and sort non-adjacent arrays in your data, nest the CHOOSECOLS or CHOOSEROWS functions inside your SORT or SORTBY formula. Alternatively, to extract, filter, and sort columns from a dataset ...