Advanced Excel Formulas

List of Top 10 Advanced Excel Formulas & Functions

#1 – VLOOKUP Formula in Excel

This advanced excel function is one of the most used formulae in excel. It is mainly due to the simplicity of this formula and its application in looking up a certain value from other tables, which has one common variable across these tables. Suppose you have two tables with details about a company’s Employee salary and name with Employee ID being a primary column. You want to get the salary from Table B in Table A.

You can use VLOOKUPUse VLOOKUPThe VLOOKUP excel function searches for a particular value and returns a corresponding match based on a unique identifier. A unique identifier is uniquely associated with all the records of the database. For instance, employee ID, student roll number, customer contact number, seller email address, etc., are unique identifiers. read more as below.

It will result in the table below when we apply this advanced excel formula in other cells of the Employee Salary column.

Drag the Formula to the Rest of the cells.

There are three  major delimitations of VLOOKUP:

1. You cannot have a primary column in the right of the column for which you want to populate the value from another table. In this case, the Employee Salary column cannot be before Employee ID.
2. In the duplicated values in the primary column in Table B, the first value will get populated in the cell.
3. If you insert a new column in the database (Ex Insert a new column before Employee Salary in Table B), the output of the formula could be different based on a position which you have mentioned in the formula (In the above case, the result would be blank)

#2 – INDEX Formula in Excel

This advanced excel formula is used to get the value of a cell in a given table by specifying the number of rows, columns, or both. Ex. To get the name of an employee at the 5^th observation, Below is the data.

We can use the advanced excel formula as below:

The same INDEX formula can be used in getting value along the row. When using both row and column number, the syntax would look like something like this:

The above formula would return “Rajesh Ved.”

Note: If you insert another row into the 5^th row, the formula will return “Chandan Kale.” Hence, the output would depend on any changes happening in the data table over time.

#3 – MATCH Formula in Excel

This Excel advanced formula returns the row or column number when there is a specific string or number in the given range. In the below example, we are trying to find “Rajesh Ved” in the Employee Name column.

The Formula would be as given below:

The MATCH functionMATCH FunctionThe MATCH function looks for a specific value and returns its relative position in a given range of cells. The output is the first position found for the given value. Being a lookup and reference function, it works for both an exact and approximate match. For example, if the range A11:A15 consists of the numbers 2, 9, 8, 14, 32, the formula “MATCH(8,A11:A15,0)” returns 3. This is because the number 8 is at the third position. read more would return 5 as the value.

The 3^rd argument is used for the exact match. You can also use +1 and -1 based on your requirements.

Note: One can combine INDEX and MATCH to overcome the limitation of VLOOKUP.

#4 – IF AND Formula in Excel

There are many instances when one needs to create flags based on some constraints. We all are familiar with the basic syntax of IF. We use this advanced excel IF functionExcel IF FunctionIF function in Excel evaluates whether a given condition is met and returns a value depending on whether the result is “true” or “false”. It is a conditional function of Excel, which returns the result based on the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the given criteria. read more to create a new field based on some constraint on an existing field. But what if we need to use multiple columns into consideration while creating a flag. Ex. In the below case, we want to flag all the employees whose salary is greater than 50K but employee ID greater than 3.

We would use IF AND in such cases. Please find below the screenshot for the same.

It would return the result as 0.

We can have many conditions or constraints to create a flag based on multiple columns using AND.

#5 – IF OR Formula in Excel

Similarly, we can also use the OR function in excelUse The OR Function In ExcelThe OR function in Excel is used to test various conditions, allowing you to compare two values or statements in Excel. If at least one of the arguments or conditions evaluates to TRUE, it will return TRUE. Similarly, if all of the arguments or conditions are FALSE, it will return FASLE.read more instead of AND if we need to satisfy one of the conditions of many.

In the above cases, if any of one condition gets satisfied, we will have cell populated as 1 else 0. We can also substitute 1 or 0 by some substrings with double quotes (“ ”).

#6 – SUMIF Formula in Excel

In some analyses, you might need to filter some observations when applying the sum or count function. In such cases, this advanced excel SUMIF function in excelSUMIF Function In ExcelThe SUMIF Excel function calculates the sum of a range of cells based on given criteria. The criteria can include dates, numbers, and text. For example, the formula “=SUMIF(B1:B5, “<=12”)” adds the values in the cell range B1:B5, which are less than or equal to 12. read more is at our rescue. It filters all the observations based on certain conditions given in this advanced excel formula and sums up them. Ex. What if we want to know the sum of salaries of only those employees who have employee ID greater than 3.

By Applying the SUMIFS FormulaSUMIFS FormulaIn Excel, SUMIFS is an in-built function that calculates the sum of all those cells which meet the multiple specified criteria & it is widely used as a conditional statement. read more:

The Formula returns the results as 322000.

We can also count the number of employees in the organization having employee ID greater than 3 when using COUNTIF instead of SUMIF.

#7 – CONCATENATE Formula in Excel

This excel advanced function is one of the formulae that can be used with multiple variants. This advanced excel formula helps us to join several text strings into one text string. Ex, If we want to show employee ID and Employee Name in a single column.

We can use this CONCATENATE formula to do that.

The above formula will result in “1Aman Gupta”.

We can have one more variant by putting a single hyphen between ID and NAME. Ex. CONCATENATE(B3,”-“,C3) will result in “1-Aman Gupta”. We can also use this into VLOOKUP when LOOKUP in excelLOOKUP In ExcelThe LOOKUP excel function searches a value in a range (single row or single column) and returns a corresponding match from the same position of another range (single row or single column). The corresponding match is a piece of information associated with the value being searched. read more value is a mixture of more than one variable.

#8 – LEFT, MID, and RIGHT Formula in Excel

We can use this advanced excel formula to extract a specific substring from a given string. It could be used based on our requirements. Ex. If we want to extract the first 5 characters from Employee Name, we can use the LEFT formula in excelLEFT Formula In ExcelThe left function returns the number of characters from the start of the string. For example, if we use this function as =LEFT ( "ANAND",2), the result will be AN.read more with the column name and second parameter as 5.

The Output is given below:

The application of the RIGHT formula in excelRIGHT Formula In ExcelRight function is a text function which gives the number of characters from the end from the string which is from right to left. For example, if we use this function as =RIGHT ( “ANAND”,2) this will give us ND as the result.read more is also the same. It’s just that we would be looking at the character from a right of the string. However, in the case of a MID function in excelMID Function In ExcelThe mid function in Excel is a text function that finds strings and returns them from any mid-part of the spreadsheet. read more, we must give the starting position of the required text string and length of the string.

#9 – OFFSET Formula in Excel

This advanced excel function with a combination of other functions such as SUM or AVERAGE, could give a dynamic touch to the calculations. It is best used in cases when we are inserting continuous rows into an existing database. OFFSET ExcelOFFSET ExcelThe OFFSET function in excel returns the value of a cell or a range (of adjacent cells) which is a particular number of rows and columns from the reference point. read more provides us with a range where we need to mention reference cell, number of rows, and columns. Ex. If we want to calculate the average of the first 5 employees in the company where we have a salary of employees sorted by employee ID, we can do the following. The below calculation will always give us salaried.

• It will give us the sum of salaries of the first 5 employees.

#10 – TRIM Formula in Excel

This advanced excel formula is used to clean up the unimportant spaces from the text. Ex. If we want to remove spaces at the beginning of some name, we can use it by using the TRIM function in excelTRIM Function In ExcelThe Trim function in Excel does exactly what its name implies: it trims some part of any string. The function of this formula is to remove any space in a given string. It does not remove a single space between two words, but it does remove any other unwanted spaces.read more as below:

The resultant output would be “Chandan Kale” without any space before Chandan.

Recommended Articles

This has been a guide to Advanced Formulas in Excel. Here we discuss the Top 10 Most Useful Advanced Formulas & Functions in Excel, including VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, SUMIF, CONCATENATE, etc. with a downloadable excel template. You may learn more about excel from the following articles –

• Basic Excel Formulas
• VBA MID Function
• Match in Excel
• VLookup with IF