Looking Backward through a Data Table

(see Figure 1 below)

How to use vlookup for filling the columns g,h,i for each vehicle number

Another very simple method to obtain the desired result, without formulas nor copying down, is to filter the table for the vehicle number. The last row shows the wanted mileage.

Of course, TODAY (2021) (and in 2020, at first only if you were a beta (yeah... or alpha...) tester, er, I mean "Office Insider", of course) but after a while in 2020) the best way to do this would be to use XLOOKUP() for most searches like this. It lets you search end toward beginning so... kind of a slam dunk unless it somehow can't fit the precise situation (which does happen).

But... if you want, or need, the old school way, the LOOKUP() solution is pretty traditionally old school, but there's another old school way that works nicely and it has the advantage of its workings being more "intuitively obvious to the casual observer" (and I don't mean in the sarcastic way that was used as a joke in college around 1980) and so is easier to maintain.

It uses INDEX(). INDEX() can do many things, but one is that it can invert a range for you. The trick was slightly obtuse, but understandable, then, and even clearer now we also have SEQUENCE(). That trick is to specify the rows in reverse order.

You might think you can't, because Excel "regularizes" any range addressing you use: give it D2:A7 and it will not only make the column references A:D rather than D:A, it will also use the row references with the "proper" column order to specify the same rectangle, which looks a lot like it is switching the example's rows around as well, though you can see it isn't really. So it regularizes D2:A7 to be A2:D7. That means the usual old school trick to get a number sequence, "ROW(1:5)" to get {1,2,3,4,5} won't directly get a reverse sequence like {5,4,3,2,1} just by using "ROW(5:1)" because Excel will "fix" that to be "ROW(1:5) and give you the rising sequence instead. (That's why SEQUENCE() is so nice: it does what it's told, not what it hears. So "SEQUENCE(5,1,5,-1) gives you the falling sequence {5,4,3,2,1}, as desired.)

BUT... if you know the number of values you need (the number of "rows" you want to use in "1:x"), you can take the next higher integer and SUBTRACT the usual ("ROW(1:5)") trick. So "6-ROW(1:5)" gives you {5,4,3,2,1}. And you do usually know the number of rows just from looking at the range address you entered (or using ROWS() on the Named Range, etc.). As a minimum, you can use something complicated looking like "ROWS(A1:B5)+1-ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&ROWS(A1:B5)))" where the first two terms figure the number to subtract from and the last term builds the "ROW(1:x)" part of it.

So, say your range is E1:F5 and you'd like to search it in reverse using VLOOKUP(). For the search range parameter, use the following INDEX() function:

INDEX(E1:F5,ROWS(E1:F5)+1-ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&ROWS(E1:F5))),{1,2})

it rearranges the table from bottom to top, neatly inverting it. The last parameter in it ("{1,2}") specifies the columns and keeps them in the same order. That's what's desired in this problem. But if you want a fuller inversion, you could reverse that as well ("{2,1}"). Lots of possibilities there.

Why bother if you have XLOOKUP() handy, eh? But if you don't, or it won't fit the situation, just do the above. If you have SEQUENCE() available, use it instead of all the ROW(), ROWS(), and INDIRECT() portions.

One situation that XLOOKUP() doesn't fit so wonderfully, because it WON'T return a 2-D result (actually, to be precise, I don't think it can FORM a 2-D result, hence also cannot return one), is, well... when you need a 2-D result...

If using FILTER() to form the table that will be inverted, then unlike most times when using FILTER()'s results inside a formula, instead of basing the rows for the sequence on the rows in the range FILTER() is working upon, one needs to base it upon the number of rows FILTER() is feeding forward into the rest of the formula. Otherwise one gets extra lines of return which contain errors and that might affect one's formula's approach as it might not handle those errors in a desirable way.