Happy Halloween! š»
Let’s do something fun.
You are invited to leave your comments below. For what? For sharing with us any “weird” formula that you have ever seen in Excel. Real cases please. š
Wait… what do I mean “weird”?
Let’s define it in this way:
A weird formula is one that is written in a “strange” manner. It could be the uses of functions, or simply the way it is written.
Here’s my examples:
=SUM(VLOOKUP(A1,D1:F10,2,false))
=SUM(A1+A2+A3)
=SUM(A1*A2)
The above examples are real. I received a workbook where all formula are wrapped with SUM, for no particular reasons. All formula work perfectly fine without SUM.
So now is your turn. What weird formula you’d encountered? Please leave your comments. š»
wmfexcel 
=VLOOKUP(A1,Sheet2!A:A,1,FALSE)
This one is weird because VLOOKUP should never be used in the first place (use INDEX-MATCH instead). But I consider it especially weird because it’s an uninformative and somewhat circular formula. It’s a one-column search and return, so if the value we already have can be found, then we’ll get back the same thing we already had in the first place. A simple MATCH, wrapped inside ISNUMBER or ISNA if desired, is a more straightforward and informative way of asking the simple question of whether or not a match was found and can even tell us where it was found.
=IF(A1=B1,TRUE,FALSE)
Simply using =A1=B1 would give the same TRUE or FALSE answer.
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