Spreadsheet anxiety meets genuine ambition at the exact moment when someone faces a list of current students, a request for newly enrolled ones, and a boss who uses VLOOKUP. You have a list of all current students, a request from the insurance company for newly enrolled ones, and a boss who uses VLOOKUP. The instinct to learn the tool rather than just ask for the answer is the right one. But the real insight here is that VLOOKUP is not the solution to your problem. It is a bridge to the real solution.
VLOOKUP is designed to find a match and return a related value. In your case, you want to find students who do not have a match in the previous term's list. That is a different operation entirely. The tool you need is a simple comparison between two columns. If you have the current enrollment list and the previous term's enrollment list, you can identify new students by looking for names or IDs that appear in one list but not the other. A conditional format or a basic IF formula paired with COUNTIF will do this more directly than VLOOKUP. Your boss used VLOOKUP because it is a familiar hammer, but the task is a screw.
What this means for you in practical terms is that your willingness to learn is more valuable than the specific function you are trying to master. You are not bad at Excel. You are early in the journey of understanding how data relationships work. The moment you shift your thinking from "which formula do I copy" to "what am I trying to compare" is the moment you stop feeling overwhelmed. The insurance company does not care about your VLOOKUP syntax. They care about the correct list of new students. That list is waiting for you, and it requires a logical step, not a complex one.
Start by sorting both lists alphabetically. Then use a simple COUNTIF formula in a new column next to your current roster to check if each student ID exists in the previous term's list. Any row that returns zero is a new enrollment. That is your answer. No nested functions, no lookup table anxiety. Just a clean, verifiable result. You already have the desire to learn. That is the hardest part. Now let the logic guide the formula, not the other way around.