Does the [ search_type ] difference in MATCH affect performance?

James Keuning

I am trying to consider why I would use 1 instead of 0, and I can only think that it must be a performance issue.

This assumes that search_type 1 uses divide and conquer, where as 0 searches linearly.

I have had situations were using 1 gets a bad result if the lookup range gets sorted, so I make sure I use 0 to mitigate that. And I want to make sure that I am not overlooking someone other downside to using 0.

Paul Newcome

1 and -1 give an approximate match whereas 0 gives an exact match.

Smartsheet calculates the relative position of a search value by counting cells from left to right (across columns), then top to bottom (across rows). In a lookup table consisting of two columns, the cell in the top row of the leftmost column is the first position, 1.

For the optional [search_type] argument:

• 1 (the default value) finds the largest value less than or equal to search_value (requires that the range be sorted in ascending order).
• 0 find the first exact match (the range may be unordered).
• -1 finds the smallest value greater than or equal to search_value (requires that the range be sorted in descending order).