Here is a range of numbers provided as an example. It could be any unsorted range/list of numbers you're working on:
Your data set is large and for some specific analytical reason you'd like to track the sum of several largest and smallest numbers in your set. The ARRAY formulas come to help and are very efficient in such cases.
Suppose you want to find the longest or shortest entry from a long list of text strings. Or, maybe you need to retrieve the 2nd, or 3rd or 4th longest/shortest entry from the list. How to do it?
Let's start with this small fragment of a big table, for example:
There are situations when we need to find out what is the highest or the lowest value in your table or any array of numbers. And sometimes we may need to determine what is the second or third highest or lowest value in a given range. In all such cases ARRAY formulas are very helpful, so I'm providing some examples of using them.
Let's look first at finding the highest/lowest values in an array/table of numbers. Here is a small sample range of numbers:
