Case Function Equivalent in Excel

Question

I have an interesting challenge - I need to run a check on the following data in Excel:

|   A  -   B  -   C  -  D   |
|------|------|------|------|
|  36  |          


        

Answer 1

If your using Office 2016 or later, or Office 365, there is a new function that acts similarly to a CASE function called IFS. Here's the description of the function from Microsoft's documentation:

The IFS function checks whether one or more conditions are met, and returns a value that corresponds to the first TRUE condition. IFS can take the place of multiple nested IF statements, and is much easier to read with multiple conditions.

An example of usage follows:

=IFS(A2>89,"A",A2>79,"B",A2>69,"C",A2>59,"D",TRUE,"F")

You can even specify a default result:

To specify a default result, enter TRUE for your final logical_test argument. If none of the other conditions are met, the corresponding value will be returned.

The default result feature is included in the example shown above.

You can read more about it on Microsoft's Support Documentation

Answer 2

Even if old, this seems to be a popular questions, so I'll post another solution, which I think is very elegant:

http://fiveminutelessons.com/learn-microsoft-excel/using-multiple-if-statements-excel

It's elegant because it uses just the IF function. Basically, it boils down to this:

if(condition, choose/use a value from the table, if(condition, choose/use another value from the table...

And so on

Works beautifully, even better than HLOOKUP or VLOOOKUP

but... Be warned - there is a limit to the number of nested if statements excel can handle.

Answer 3

Recently I unfortunately had to work with Excel 2010 again for a while and I missed the SWITCH function a lot. I came up with the following to try to minimize my pain:

=CHOOSE(SUM((A1={"a";"b";"c"})*ROW(INDIRECT(1&":"&3))),1,2,3)
CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

where A1 is where your condition lies (it could be a formula, whatever). The good thing is that we just have to provide the condition once (just like SWITCH) and the cases (in this example: a,b,c) and results (in this example: 1,2,3) are ordered, which makes it easy to reason about.

Here is how it works:

• Cond={"c1";"c2";...;"cn"} returns a N-vector of TRUE or FALSE (with behaves like 1s and 0s)
• ROW(INDIRECT(1&":"&n)) returns a N-vector of ordered numbers: 1;2;3;...;n
• The multiplication of both vectors will return lots of zeros and a number (position) where the condition was matched
• SUM just transforms this vector with zeros and a position into just a single number, which CHOOSE then can use
• If you want to add another condition, just remember to increment the last number inside INDIRECT
• If you want an ELSE case, just wrap it inside an IFERROR formula
• The formula will not behave properly if you provide the same condition more than once, but I guess nobody would want to do that anyway

Answer 4

Without reference to the original problem (which I suspect is long since solved), I very recently discovered a neat trick that makes the Choose function work exactly like a select case statement without any need to modify data. There's only one catch: only one of your choose conditions can be true at any one time.

The syntax is as follows:

CHOOSE( 
    (1 * (CONDITION_1)) + (2 * (CONDITION_2)) + ... + (N * (CONDITION_N)),
    RESULT_1, RESULT_2, ... , RESULT_N
)

On the assumption that only one of the conditions 1 to N will be true, everything else is 0, meaning the numeric value will correspond to the appropriate result.

If you are not 100% certain that all conditions are mutually exclusive, you might prefer something like:

CHOOSE(
    (1 * TEST1) + (2 * TEST2) + (4 * TEST3) + (8 * TEST4) ... (2^N * TESTN)
    OUT1, OUT2, , OUT3, , , , OUT4 , , <LOTS OF COMMAS> , OUT5
)

That said, if Excel has an upper limit on the number of arguments a function can take, you'd hit it pretty quickly.

Honestly, can't believe it's taken me years to work it out, but I haven't seen it before, so figured I'd leave it here to help others.

EDIT: Per comment below from @aTrusty: Silly numbers of commas can be eliminated (and as a result, the choose statement would work for up to 254 cases) by using a formula of the following form:

CHOOSE(
    1 + LOG(1 + (2*TEST1) + (4*TEST2) + (8*TEST3) + (16*TEST4),2), 
    OTHERWISE, RESULT1, RESULT2, RESULT3, RESULT4
)

Note the second argument to the LOG clause, which puts it in base 2 and makes the whole thing work.

Edit: Per David's answer, there's now an actual switch statement if you're lucky enough to be working on office 2016. Aside from difficulty in reading, this also means you get the efficiency of switch, not just the behaviour!

Answer 5

I used this solution to convert single letter color codes into their descriptions:

=CHOOSE(FIND(H5,"GYR"),"Good","OK","Bad")

You basically look up the element you're trying to decode in the array, then use CHOOSE() to pick the associated item. It's a little more compact than building a table for VLOOKUP().

Answer 6

Microsoft replace SWITCH, IFS and IFVALUES with CHOOSE only function.

=CHOOSE($L$1,"index_1","Index_2","Index_3")