How do you nest a function in Microsoft Excel?

Answer 1

Nesting is putting functions inside another functions. Lots of functions work together and can be nested. You should be careful as sometimes it can be complicated. There are things like having the right amount of brackets. Often it is best to initially do the functions separately and make sure they are working and only then nest them.

As a simple example, say you had two lists of numbers and you wanted to get the total of each list and then find which was the highest of the two totals. You could use SUM to get the two totals and then use MAX to get the highest. You could do it all separately as three functions. The advantage of that would be that you would see the two individual totals on your spreadsheet. However you may only want just to see the highest total. In that case you could nest the two SUM functions inside a MAXfunction. So say one list was from A2 to A20 and the other was C2 to C20, you could do this:

=MAX(SUM(A2:A20),SUM(C2:C20))