In today’s quick tip, lets find how to check for between conditions in Excel using formulas, like this:
Between Formula in Excel for Numbers:
Lets say you have 3 values in A1, A2 and A3. And you want to find out if A1 falls between A2 and A3.
Now, the simplest formula for such a thing would be test whether the conditions A1>=A2, A1<=A3 are both true. Hence, it would look like,
=if(AND(A1>=A2,A1<=A3),"Yes", "No")
However, there are 2 problems with a formula like above:
1. It assumes that A2 is smaller than A3.
2. It is just too big.
Shouldn’t there be a shorter and simpler formula?!?
Well, there is. Last week when chatting with Daniel Ferry, he mentioned a darned clever use of MEDIAN formula to test this. It goes like,
=if(A1=MEDIAN(A1:A3),"Yes","No")
Now, not only does the above formula look elegant and simple, it also works whether A2 is smaller or larger than A3.
Between Formula in Excel for Dates:
Well, dates are just numbers in Excel. So you can safely use the technique above to test if a given date in A1 falls between the two dates in A2 and A3, like this:
=if(A1=MEDIAN(A1:A3),"Yes","No")
Between Formula for Text Values:
Lets say you want to find-out if the text in A1 is between text in A2 and A3 when arranged alphabetically, a la in dictionary. You can do so in Excel using,
…
wait for it…
…
that is right, <= and >= operators, like this:
=if(AND(A1>=A2,A1<=A3),"Yes", "No")
Between Formulas in Excel – Summary and Examples:
Here is a list of examples and the corresponding Excel Formulas to test the between condition.
Do you check for Between Conditions in Excel?
Checking if a value falls between 2 other values is fairly common when you are working with data. I would love to know how you test for such conditions in excel? What kind of formulas do you use?
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