Excel Tip: Finding the maximum or minimum value in a list

Before we crack on with this week's post, just a quick little note about Mynda Treacy's Excel Dashboards course.

I know that many of you have purchased the course and taken advantage of the early bird discount. As when we offered the course last time, the course has been very popular and the feedback has been excellent.

If you haven't already done so, you can still get the course until 30th October and, although you have missed the discount, the course still represents excellent value and I will still throw in my Introduction to Pivot Tables course free of charge.

You can get the course here.

OK, on with this week's tip. We all know how to sum a list of numbers, but Excel offers a number of other functions for analysing a list, and today I want to introduce two of them that enable you to find the maximum or minimum value in a list.

This could be useful for all sorts of reasons - finding the maximum sales in any particular month, or the lowest score achieved in a test, for example.

Excel offers a simple way of doing this with the MAX and MIN functions.

Both functions have the following syntax:

=MAX(number1,number2,etc.) you can have as many numbers as you like in this list.

So, for example:

=MAX(23,45,12,65,21)  will return 65

and

=MIN(23,45,12,65,21)  will return 12

These numbers can be cell references, or ranges of cells - and this is usually of far more practical use.

So, say the cells A1 to A5 contain the numbers 23,45,12,65 and 21, then:

=MAX(A1:A5)  will return 65

and

=MIN(A1:A5)   will return 12

And that's really all you need to know.



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