Excel woes

xirokx · 4 Sep 2008 at 19:26

Hi,

I am desperately trying to get my head around Index & Match and SUMIF functions in excel ....I need it for work, so need to understand it on a level where when I need to do some analysis I can easily say "yep I can index match that or SUMIF the other"..

What do you guys suggest?

Do you know of any tutorials that can quickly and easily help me master this?

Please help

Cheers

Dolph · 4 Sep 2008 at 19:30

where have you looked so far, and what sort of data are you trying to manage and manipulate? Also does it have to be done entirely in Excel, as generally data handling like that is much easier done in something like Access, even if the only influence access has is in the data sorting and all the front end is handled via excel...

mark66 · 4 Sep 2008 at 19:44

Hi,

My brother is pretty good with Excel and he put the following spreadsheet together to help me understand and better use Index, Match and Rank.

It doesn't cover SUMIF, but I hope it well help..

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pY3Dcu3E_Qs1oLoAJitVGFg

(I haven't used Google docs before, but hope it works ok!)

xirokx · 4 Sep 2008 at 20:36

has to be excel...

mark thats great but I was hoping for something a bit more idiot proof as Im a newb something like a little tutorial...

So far I have checked google and failed miserably in finding anything useful which is written in lamens terms..

mark66 · 4 Sep 2008 at 22:58

Hi,

TBH I am not sure that a purely text based guide will be much more of an aid...

I have re-hosted the file somewhere else so you should be able to download and work with the spreadsheet. It is basically a guide with an introduction on sheet1 and then moving onto combining the commands on the other two sheets. If you go to the first example in cell B21 and read the description it will explain what it is doing and you can see the results first hand. It has helped me out many times!

Index, Match & Rank