AND, OR, WHAT?

Logic Functions can often be an Excel user’s best friend (maybe not their BFF, but a really good friend nonetheless…).  The Major Logic Functions are: AND, IF, IFERROR, and OR.

A brief study of the AND and OR functions is a worthy exercise for any Excel user who never (or seldom) uses these valuable logic functions.

As with most Logic Functions, the AND and OR functions return a TRUE or FALSE result.  When used with other logic functions such as IF or IFERROR, they can be tremendous tools for extracting information from your data. 

 

Inclusive and Exclusive:

• ·         As shown in the syntaxes below, the OR function is very Inclusive. If Any of the Conditions are True, then the OR function will return a True result.
• ·         The AND function, on the other hand is highly Exclusive. If Any of the conditions are False, then the AND function will return a False result (All of the conditions must be True to return a True result).

Syntaxes:

• ·         OR function syntax: OR(Condition1, Condition2, Condition3, etc)
• ·         AND function syntax: AND(Condition1, Condition2, Condition3, etc)

For example, OR(A1>20%,A2>20%,A3>20%) returns TRUE if Any of the cells referenced are over 20%.

 

In the case of the following, AND(A1>20%,A2>20%,A3>20%) returns TRUE only if All of the cells referenced are over 20%.

 

It only takes a small bit of imagination to see how these cool functions can be applied to sales, marketing, customer service, or myriad other data-hungry applications.  AND/OR – Why not!