Google Sheets referenced cells and sorting

Question

I am working on a grades input spreadsheet.

Consider 3 sheets:

1. A list of assessments containing references, names, weighing etc.
2. A list of students, with IDs etc.
3. A table with student names in rows referred from sheet 2; assessment names in columns transposed from sheet 1.

Now my problem is that once grades are entered in 3, if sheets 1 or 2 are sorted, the values in sheet 3 do not match with headers anymore.

How can I make sure that sorting values in sheet 1 or 2 will keep values in sheet 3 associated with their respective headers?

Answer 1

I've worked around my problem by keeping the sheets off reference and using a VLOOKUP() function instead. For instance I can look up a column for a name and find the corresponding grade.

=VLOOKUP("John", 'Other Sheet'!$E$4:$H$40, 2, FALSE)

The above sample would look up the range, trying to find the name "John" in the first column and retrieving the value from the second column (use FALSE if the first column is unsorted).