Office 2013 Bible: The Comprehensive Tutorial Resource

Chapter 17

Creating Formulas That Count and Sum

IN THIS CHAPTER

Introducing various ways to count and sum cells

Creating basic counting and summing formulas

Working with advanced counting and summing formulas

Developing conditional summing formulas

Many of the most common spreadsheet questions involve counting and summing values and other worksheet elements. It seems that people are always looking for formulas to count or to sum various items in a worksheet. If I’ve done my job, this chapter answers the vast majority of such questions. It contains many examples that you can easily adapt to your own situation.

Counting and Summing Worksheet Cells

Generally, a counting formula returns the number of cells in a specified range that meet certain criteria. A summing formula returns the sum of the values of the cells in a range that meet certain criteria.

Table 17.1 lists the Excel worksheet functions that come into play when creating counting and summing formulas. Not all these functions are covered in this chapter. If none of the functions in Table 17.1 can solve your problem, it’s likely that an array formula can come to the rescue; refer to Excel’s Help to learn more about array formulas.

Note

If your data is in the form of a table, you can use filtering to accomplish many counting and summing operations. Just set the filter criteria, and the table displays only the rows that match your criteria (the nonqualifying rows in the table are hidden). Then you can select formulas to display ...