Almost all of the needs of a modern-day corporate entity, or a small business can be fulfilled by using Microsoft Excel software.
This is my humble opinion, though, and I may be wrong, however, it is an undeniable observation on my part, and I have gathered feedback from many professionals in the industry, that many of the financial and record keeping aspects of organizations can be maneuvered using the software.
Recently, I was asked an interview question regarding the “SUMIF” function of Excel. I politely told them about my ignorance of the function; however, it got stuck in my mind. So afterwards, I did a little research on the function to understand it and have consequently placed it below my way of understanding it.
In Excel, by specifying the list to be worked on, the filter criteria, and the field to be summarized, it is possible to use conditional =IF functions. SUMIF is one of them.
The function has three portions, range, criteria, and sum_range.
So how will it proceed? Let me explain in my own words. Mind it, this does not represent the actual machine language or work behind the function.
a) The function will go through the range provided, let’s say, from 2019 to 2024.
b) It will then check for the criteria, for example, if the criteria are the year 2020 from the above year range, it will mark that criterion.
c) Lastly, it will check the sum range for every corresponding value to the criteria value cell and bring back the sum of those corresponding cell values.
I have an image placed below for better understanding the function:
Here you see, checking the total sales in Lahore region is convenient in this situation, as the function has gone through the RANGE of C13 to C18, checked the CRITERIA in B22 i.e., (Lhr), and added all corresponding values of B22 in the SUM_RANGE D13 to D18, bringing back the value of 3200.
“SUMIF” handles one condition at a time, while the similar function “SUMIFS” can evaluate multiple criteria at a time.
To be honest, it is a great function for decision points, which helps you make decisions accordingly. I hope this helped!
Credit: Featured Image by our-team on Freepik
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