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:
Let's say we are dealing with Excel table several columns wide and hundreds and hundreds, or even thousands of rows long. Just for illustration I'm providing here a small 'fake' table, a fragment of a big one:
Working on such a large table we may need to find addresses of cells containing some specific values, name, date, number, etc., and we need to look for them quickly.
