Comments on: Counting or summing vlookup in Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc

By: Lisa

Lisa — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:22:16 +0000

I also had an issue with SUMPRODUCT in Excel 2010. Didn’t try Dave’s fixed option but did get solution with SUMIF. I was trying to sum debits when the transaction description was "Tx to Savings". Originally, VLOOKUP worked…the first time… but then duh…there was no instruction to sum. Removed vlookup and SUMIF worked great with *-1 of course to make the debit a positive number. Thanks for the inspiration!

=SUMIF(A2:A20,"Tx to Savings",B2:B20)*-1

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:22:07 +0000

Hi, thanks for your tips. Just thought you might like to know that (my version at least of) Excel doesn’t seem to cope with the first one (I haven’t tested the rest) because of an issue with the result’s format and just returns zero. So some extra brackets and forcing it to be a number-result with +0 helps it out.

Original:
=SUMPRODUCT($A$2:$A$10=D2,$B$2:$B$10)

Fixed for Excel:
=SUMPRODUCT(($A$2:$A$10=D2)+0,$B$2:$B$10)

By: Aziyo

Aziyo — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:18:07 +0000

Good tips, Peter. In problem #1, For large datasets, INDEX & MATCH functions perform much quicker than an exact match VLOOKUP:
=INDEX($B$2:B10,MATCH(D2,$A$2:$A$10,0))
Once you get comfortable with them, you’ll never use a VLOOKUP again.

For the 2nd problem, SUMIF gets the same solutoin and may be easier to wrap your head around:
=SUMIF($A$2:$A$10,D2,$B$2:$B$10)

For #3, an array formula (CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER) using the same logic, but not easy to read:
{=SUM(IF(ISERROR(SEARCH(D2,$A$2:$A$10))=FALSE,$B$2:$B$10))}

Another option is to use a PivotTable with a helper column of String functions to isolate the domain name. This is faster for large datasets (or slow computers!) and doesn’t require re-typing domain names.