Microsoft Office

Performing Magic with
Array Formulas
The preceding chapter provides an introduction to arrays and array formulas
and presented some basic examples to whet your appetite. This chapter
continues the saga and provides many useful examples that further
demonstrate the power of this feature.
I selected the examples in this chapter to provide a good assortment of the various
uses for array formulas. You can use most of them as-is. You will, of course,
need to adjust the range names or references used. Also, you can modify many of
the examples easily to work in a slightly different manner.
Working with Single-Cell Array
Formulas
As I describe in the preceding chapter, you enter single-cell array formulas into a
single cell (not into a range of cells). These array formulas work with arrays contained
in a range or that exist in memory. This section provides some additional
examples of such array formulas.
ON the CD-ROM
The examples in this section are available on the companion
CD-ROM. The file is named single-cell array formulas.xlsx.
IN THIS CHAPTER
More examples of single-cell
array formulas
More examples of multicell array
formulas
Returning an array from a
custom VBA function
Summing a range that contains errors
You may have discovered that the SUM function doesn’t work if you attempt to
sum a range that contains one or more error values (such as #DIV/0! or #N/A).
Figure 18.1 shows an example. The formula in cell C11 returns an error value
because the range that it sums (C4:C10) contains errors.
The following array formula, in cell C13, overcomes this problem and returns the
sum of the values, even if the range contains error values:
{=SUM(IF(ISERROR(C4:C10),””,C4:C10))}
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