You will sometimes want to retrieve data from a table with values both in rows and columns and based on multiple (three or more criteria). There is, as usual, more than one way to do this. However, most of those ways require you to use something called array formulas – in essence, you will have to press Ctrl Shift Enter combination on your keyboard every time you want to calculate that formula.
Combining SUMIFS with INDEX MATCH enables us to retrieve that data without such issues.
Let’s look at this table:
Let’s say we want to retrieve the value in the I6 column (marked orange).
With the SUMIFS formula, that is rather simple:
We’ve successfully retrieved our value:
However, we don’t necessary always want to retrieve data from just the Apr-20 column, we want to retrieve data from the specified column. Here is where INDEX MATCH comes into play. With INDEX MATCH we can retrieve the specified column, which we will later use as sum_range in the SUMIFS formula.
If we specify row number as 0, all of the rows, i.e. the whole column, will be returned:
This by itself doesn’t produce anything useful as we are returning the whole column into a single cell:
Only once we combine the formulas, i.e. the column returned by INDEX MATCH is our sum_range in the SUMIFS formula, we can return our number for the specified column:
We’ve now successfully retrieved our value form the specified column, for the specified criteria:
We can use the exact same formula to retrieve our value from any column that we want:
Naturally, if our criteria are matched in multiple rows, we will return the sum of those returns with the SUMIFS formula:
The basic principles shown here can be applied to other formulas as well, for example, you can combine AVERAGEIFS and INDEX MATCH.
All you have to do in order for your formulas to work properly is:
- define your row number as zero in INDEX MATCH in order to return the whole column
- make sure that your column is of the same size and in the same position as your criteria columns.
If we were to combine SUMIFS with INDEX MATCH in order to retrieve data from an Excel Table using structured references, the last formula shown above would look like this:
=SUMIFS(
INDEX(Table[[Jan-20]:[Jun-20]];0;MATCH(TEXT(A15;”[$-en-US]MMM-YY”);Table[[#Headers];[Jan-20]:[Jun-20]];0));
Table[[Team]:[Team]];“red”;Table[[Stars]:[Stars]];“yes”;Table[[Stars2]:[Stars2]];1)
This formula is easier to understand, but at the same time, special considerations have to be given to the numbers formatted as text in column names.
Dig deeper: