Ah, the elusive pivot table. Everyone fears it, nobody understands how it works, and those who unlock its mysteries are the Excel wizards we all hope to be. Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of a pivot table? What really makes it tick? Meet the SUMIF function - the mastermind behind it all.
The SUMIF function sums the cells within a certain range that meet a certain set of criteria. There are three arguments that make up the SUMIF function:
- range: the spread of cells to which we want to apply our criteria
- criteria: the standards we want to use to determine which cells to sum
- sum_range: the spread of cells we want to sum
Let’s check out an example of these arguments in action. Above we have web sales data, and we need to calculate the total sales for the East region. To accomplish this using the SUMIF function, we’ll first enter the function, and then select the range of cells we’d want to apply our criteria to. In this case, since we’re summing sales based on region, we’ll need to apply our criteria to the region column. Next, let’s define the criteria we’re testing for - since we’re summing the sales where region = east, let’s select “East'' in cell B3. Finally, we need to tell our function what we want to sum as the sum_range argument, so we’ll select column F of our data table to indicate that we want to know total sales value.
Once we’ve entered all three arguments, we can enter the function to instantly see the total sales for all line items from the East region! Who needs a pivot table?!
