Excel like Over/Under formula

The exact answer depends on how your spreadsheet is set up. If, for instance, you had a column labeled "budget" and another labeled "actual", then the formulas in a third column labeled, say, "deviation" could all be:

=budget-actual

This would compute positive deviations when you are under budget and negative ones for over budget. If you'd rather that was reversed, use:

=actual-budget

Hello

I just wish to write that if someone using Numbers is forced to ask about three or four functions "how may I do that while I may do that in XL" the responce is clear: stay with XL, numbers is not dedicated to the way you are crunching numbers 😉


Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 4 décembre 2007 19:06:24)

I use Excel but I'm not sure what you are asking since I've never done exactly what you describe, apparently.

You seem to want it to include text in the cell. But do you really need that? I mean, if the deviation column is a negative number or positive number, wouldn't that be sufficient to tell you if you are over or under? Do you need to have it specifically include "over", etc?

I don't actually have Numbers so I can't tell you if what you want is possible or if there is a workaround to get the text you want.

Mel2 wrote:
Great!!! Thanks so much! So now is their a way to get it to say like " $10 Over " or "At Budget" or "$30 under" like it does in excel?

There are many ways to do this... here one:

=CHOOSE(SIGN(budget-actual)+2, "$"&actual-budget&" over", "At Budget", "$"&budget-actual&" under")