IF Function in Excel Tutorial

Hi everyone, my name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can use the if function in Microsoft Excel. The if function is one of the most popular functions in Microsoft Excel. Before we jump into this, as full disclosure, I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. My HR department requires me to say that anytime I talk about Microsoft products. First off, what is the if function? So with the if function, what you can do is you can do logical comparisons. Basically, if something is true, do this. If something is false, do that. All right, well it sounds easy enough and it actually is, but let's take a look at an example. That's probably the easiest way to show what you can do with the if function. All right, let's jump on the PC. Here I am on my PC and I have a nice little table set up and we're just going to make up a fun little scenario here. Let's pretend that I work in, let's say, the compliance department within a company and I have the fun job of looking at people's expenses. So anytime someone goes on a trip or maybe they go to a conference, they submit expenses and I need to make sure all those expenses are legitimate. So let's say that an employee recently went on a trip and there are different categories of expenses. You have airfare, food, and entertainment. It wouldn't be a business trip without some good entertainment. And what we see here is column B, we have a budgeted amount. So as our company, we want to make sure that our employees stay within a certain range of how much they spend for these different activities. And then for this particular employee, we could see the actuals of how much they spent. Okay, so what I want to do is, because I work in the compliance department and I'm just looking at these things each and every single day, it's a little overwhelming looking at all these expense reports and I want to make my life easier. And luckily, the IF function can help me with that. So how do we get started with the IF function? Well, the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to click on this little insert function icon up here on the toolbar in Excel. This way we can insert a function. So let's go ahead and click on that. And now what we want to do is we're going to simply type in IF. We're going to search for the function and click on go. And what will happen is you'll see it pop up down here below where it select a function. It'll be the first one that pops up. Now let's take a quick look at the description here. So this shows you how to structure your IF function. So what you're going to do is there's some type of test you're doing. And then if it's true, do this. If it's false, do that. So that's the general structure. And I'm going to walk through how you actually do this then. And so quick look at the description, checks whether a condition is met. In my case, it's checking whether the actual spend is under the budget and returns one value of true and another value of false. Okay. Well, sounds good. Why don't we jump into the example here? Okay. So the first thing I want to do is, well, logical tests. It's basically checking what is my criteria. So what I'm going to do is I want to say, well, let's see if the actual was less than the budget amount. And so here in this case, you'll see that it says true 525 is less than 600. And now what I get to do here is it says, well, if it's true, what do I do? Well, because I want to make my life easier. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to insert a quote because I'm going to type in text and then I'll say this was within budget. And so what you'll see is if it's true, it'll say within budget. And then if it's false, I'll say over budget, and then I'll put a little dash in and say, investigate. So I'm in compliance and I'm the fun police here because I get to look at all these expenses and see where employees might have overspent. Now, what I could do is here. I typed in text. If it's true, I also typed in text. If it's false, but what I could do is I could also have it, you know, I could type in a formula here. I can basically do whatever I want if it's true or if it's false, but I just want to do a simple example here where I show text. Now I'm going to click on. Okay. And you'll see here that will 525 is less than 600. So yep, it's within budget. If I look up here now at the, if formula, you can see how it says, if C2 is less than B2 comma, then this is what I do if it's true. And then another comma, this is what I do if it's false. So that's the, that's the layout of the formula. You could also type it in. If you don't want to use the little insert function guide. Now that I've typed in my formula, well, you know, I could go through and I could type in the formula for each and every single one. But once again, I'm looking at these expense reports all day long and I would love to make my life a little easier. So what I can do is there's this little box in the bottom right-hand corner. I'm just going to double click on that. And that'll drop that same formula all the way down to all of my rows. And what you'll see happen is here, if I click on the formula, it's doing the calculation with these two. If I click on this next row, you'll see that it's doing the calculation on these two columns. And then similarly, if I click on the third one, I could see that yes, 1500 is a lot higher than 250. So this one, I'll probably have to investigate this because we only budget 250 for entertainment and this employee went way over. Now, what you can also do, which is kind of fun too, is if it's false, you could also even insert another if function here. So this is called a nested if. So then I could say, well, if it's 500 above, maybe I say investigate. And if it's only say a hundred above, then, you know, maybe I don't need to investigate. So you could get really complex with if statements where you could have multiple if statements within one statement here. So you could get some pretty complex logic going. But what I wanted to do is just show you how to use a basic if function in Microsoft Excel. Well, there you have it. That's how you use the basic if function in Microsoft Excel. It's pretty versatile. You could do a lot with it. That's why it's one of the most popular functions in Excel. If you learned how to use if, and you're putting it to good use, please give this video a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this in the future, maybe some additional functions in the future, hit that subscribe button. That way you get a notification anytime new videos like this come out. And lastly, if there are any other topics you want to see me cover in the future, leave a comment down below. I'll take a look and I'll add it to my list of videos to create in the future. All right. Well, that's all I had for you today. I'll see you next time. Bye.