Troubleshooting the IFS function

Got problems with the IFS function?

If you’re a Zero to Hero student, watch our explanation of the popular IFS function here.

If you’re still having trouble getting IFS to work, read on 🙂

There are 2 typical causes for IFS issues.

1: You don’t have an Office365 subscription

If you think you’ve written the syntax of the IFS function correctly but it looks like this:

Then you don’t have an Office365 subscription.

IFS (+MAXIFS, MINIFS, and more) only comes with an Office365 subscription. 

If you, or your company, have purchased Excel 2016 (or older) as a non-subscription product,  you won’t have access to these new functions.

Luckily, this is easy to fix.

Click here to upgrade to Office365 from only $6.99/month.

The new features that are added to Office365 every month greatly outweighs the cost of the upgrade.

I highly recommend that you upgrade to Office365!

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder

2: You are having trouble understanding the last arguments of the IFS function

Broken down into easy parts, the IFS function looks like this:

=IFS(criteria1, value if true1, criteria2, value if true2, criteria3, value if true3…)

Look at this example:

=IFS(A1>100, “Great”, B1>100, “Average”, 1, “”)

If you leave out the last 2 arguments of the function above (the orange ones), what happens when neither A1 or B1 is greater than 100?

If you don’t tell the function what to do, it will return an error.

To tell the function what to do if none of the criteria are met, simply write a ‘criteria3’ argument that is always true.

1 is always true.

Then write a comma, and type what should happen if criteria1 and criteria2 are not met. For example “” (which is nothing).

Now, your IFS function works correctly and looks similar to the one above.

Have more questions? Feel free to contact us!

Kasper Langmann, Co-founder