We’ve previously covered how we can nest the ISERROR function, the ISERR function, or the ISNA function inside the IF function in order to check for errors and perform appropriate actions if errors occur. While effective, this can make the whole formula longer than necessary and hard to read/understand/correct. The specialized IFERROR and IFNA functions with simpler syntax can take the place of the IF ISERROR and IF ISNA combinations. The IFERROR function checks whether the cell or formula …
Tag: INDEX function
Cleaning up text in Excel: CLEAN, TRIM, and SUBSTITUTE
In Excel, you will occasionally deal with text fields containing line breaks, multiple spaces, hyphenation, currency and letterlike symbols, etc. This is common when dealing with unrestricted user-inputted data and can cause issues. In particular, these kinds of values will be hard to connect with related values without cleanup. When we MATCH those values with related data tables, errors are bound to occur. Basic cleanup approaches include manual replacement of all of the unnecessary characters with a desired or …
Line breaks in Excel
A line break is the termination of one line of text, and the beginning of the next line. If needed inside of a single Excel cell, line breaks can be achieved in two ways: the Wrap Text feature allows you to make text appear to be structured into multiple lines, manual line breaks can be entered by pressing Alt + Enter. Consider the following sentence: As of Unicode version 14.0, there are 144,697 characters with code points, covering 159 …
Combining INDIRECT with ADDRESS
We’ve previously covered how we can use any function to generate a text that could be a valid cell reference, both the column and row parts of the address, and then use the INDIRECT function to convert that text to a cell reference. This process can be greatly enhanced by the ADDRESS function. The ADDRESS function returns a text string that represents the address of a particular cell. Row, column, type of reference (locked or absolute), reference style (A1 …
How to MATCH numbers formatted as text in Excel
You will sometimes encounter issues while trying to MATCH or LOOKUP data in Excel if your numbers are formatted as numbers in one of your tables and as text in another table. While special formats are available in Excel, they are relatively rarely used and are limited. Some “numbers”, such as identification numbers, are more often stored as text. This is done in order to add leading zeros, hyphens, and other characters to those numbers. However, if we try to …
Top 10 lists in Excel
When analyzing large amounts of data in Excel, often the best approach is to retrieve the top (10) values. Consider the following example: This table contains all of the invoices from January 29th. There are 904 invoices for that day. The values in the invoice column are unique, as those are invoice numbers. The values in the user column are not unique, as some users have multiple invoices on that day, and the values in the team column are not …
Combining SUMIFS with INDEX MATCH
Using the SUMIFS function, we can sum all of the values in a defined column (or row) that meet one or more criteria. When SUMIFS is combined with INDEX MATCH, that sum range doesn’t have to be defined anymore; it is now rather specified in the function arguments. By combining SUMIFS with INDEX MATCH, we can then sum all of the values that meet multiple criteria in different rows and columns and do this in a simple way, avoiding complex and …
Lookup with unique identifiers
INDEX function The INDEX function returns the value from a range of cells based on the row and column specified in the function arguments. We are simplifying here: the INDEX function can actually return values from one or more arrays, i.e., a broader term for lists of data that includes cell ranges. But the most common use is with cell ranges, as that is the typical way of structuring data in Excel. The syntax of the INDEX function is …