Excel’s IF Statements Are My Secret Weapon for Smarter Spreadsheets

IF statements in Excel are my secret sauce for transforming spreadsheets into intelligent decision-making tools. They respond to changing data, allowing me to streamline my work. Here’s how you can get started using them.

What Is the IF Statement in Excel?

The IF statement in Excel is a logical function that evaluates a condition to determine if it’s true or false. If it’s true, it returns one value, and if it’s false, it returns another.

The IF statement in Excel has the following syntax:

IF (condition_to_check, value_if_true, value_if_false) 

You only need to specify value_if_true while value_if_false is optional. However, it’s always good practice to specify value_if_false as well. If you don’t, Excel will return the value FALSE, which can be confusing or have unintended results.

Also, to use the IF statement effectively, you need to familiarize yourself with the logical operators in Excel. These will allow you to make comparisons in the function.

How to Use the IF Statement

Using an IF statement in Excel is simple once you break it down into simple terms. If a condition is true, it should return X; otherwise, it should return Y.

Let’s look at a simple budget, where the expenses are summed up into Total Expenses. We will then compare this to Budget, and display a message telling us whether we are within or over the budget. Take a look at the screenshot below of what the spreadsheet looks like.

I am going to put the IF statement in cell C7, which is next to Total Expenses. Here is how the formula should look:

=IF(B7 "Within budget!", "Exceeds budget!") 

Basically, this is saying that if the total expenses (B7) are less than () the total budget (B8), display Within budget. If they are not, show Exceeds budget.

How to Use Nested IF Statements

You can also put IF statements within others to test multiple conditions within a single formula. These are called nested IF statements, and they allow you to add more complex logic to your spreadsheets.

Here is what the syntax of a nested IF statement generally looks like:

=IF(condition1, value_if_true1, IF(condition2, value_if_true2, value_if_false2)) 

Continuing with our scenario, we will tweak our formula to show a message that tells us if we are slightly or significantly over budget. This will be dependent on whether we exceed the total budget by $100. We will use the operator, which stands for equal to or less than, for the comparison.

Here is what the formula looks like:

=IF(B7"Within Budget", IF(B7 100, "Slightly over budget!", "Significantly over budget")) 

Combining IF Statements With Other Functions

You can also insert other functions into IF statements to perform calculations based on specific conditions. In our scenario, we are going to use a combination of calculations and concatenation in Excel to display a more descriptive message. It will show us exactly how much we are over or under the budget.

Here is what that formula looks like:

=IF(B7"You are $", B8-B7, " under budget!"), CONCAT("You are $", ABS(B8-B7)," over the budget!")) 

Here, we use the CONCAT function to combine strings into a sentence. We also use the ABS function to get the absolute value of the difference between the total budget and total expenses.

You can use functions like SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, DATE, and VLOOKUP within the IF statement as well.

The IF statement is one of the most useful functions in Excel. Now that you know the basics, you can use it to do more interesting things. These include performing calculations with formulas, applying conditional formatting, handling errors, or validating inputs. Combined with nested IFs, they can become even more complex and make your spreadsheets even smarter.