What are Logical Functions used in Microsoft® Excel 2010 for?

Functions are an essential feature of Excel 2010; it’s the stuff that makes it such a powerful application. Functions make our job easy, they save our time, and even our sanity in some cases. Without knowing the proper use and application of functions, you are not utilizing Excel 2010 to its the maximum potential. Functions are broadly categorized into 11 types. The most used are Statistical, Lookup & Reference, Text, Logical, and Date & Time. Let’s look at the ‘IF’ function that is available to us in Excel 2010 under the logical functions category.

 ‘IF’ is one of the most frequently used logical functions in Excel, the syntax for a simple IF statement looks like this:

=IF(logical test, [value_if_true],[value_if_false])

Let us try and understand what this means. You can use this function in Excel to choose between two values by setting a condition. Depending on the result of the comparison, the output would change. Here’s how it works:

=IF(A1>10,”The value is greater than 10”, “The value is less than 10”)

In the above example, the function can only give you either of the two results as output, and that depends on the value in the cell A1. If the value is found to be greater than 10, the function would output: “The value is greater than 10” as the result and vice versa.

Few other commonly used logical functions are AND, FALSE, TRUE, NOT, and OR.  Logical functions help you by simplifying decision making processes in Excel so you can focus on more important things in life like sitting back on your chair and enjoying a mid-day nap.