The Anatomy of an Excel IF Function
Part 1: Introduction to IF Functions
By John Cellini
Published on July 19, 2006
The IF function is one of the most commonly used functions in Excel. The objective of Part 1 of this tutorial is to give you an understanding of how a basic IF function works.
Before we begin, you can download a practice file I prepared:
Take a look at the following worksheet (if you did not download the work file, you can just recreate the worksheet below):
In the Result column, you want to record whether a student passed or failed the exam. Instead of typing in each result (imagine if you had 50 students!), you can create IF functions that will automatically calculate the results.
Discussion
The basis of an If function is a logical test. A logical test returns a Boolean result: True or False. An IF function returns one value if the logical test is TRUE, and another value if FALSE.
Here's the syntax for an IF function:
=IF (logical_test, value_if_true, value_if_false)
Let's examine all the parts.
Functions (except for nested functions) always begin with an equal sign followed by the name of the function.
=IF
After the function name, the arguments follow enclosed in parentheses (). Arguments provide the information a particular function needs to perform its calculation. There are three arguments for an If function: (1) logical test, (2) value if true, and (3)value if false.
The opening parenthesis is typed after the function name:
=IF (
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