Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Determining If a Value is Out of Limits.

Determining If a Value is Out of Limits

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 12, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021


Jennifer has two numbers that she needs to compare in a formula. If the second number is within 5% (plus or minus) of the first number, it is considered within limits. If the second number is outside of this range, then she needs the formula to return something such as "out of limits."

There are a number of different ways you could approach your formula. Let's assume that your first number is in cell A1 and that the number you want to compare to it is in cell B1. One method is to use the IF function to do your testing:

=IF((A1-B1)>(A1*0.05),"out of limits",
IF((B1-A1)>(A1*0.05),"out of limits",
"within limits"))

This works fine, but the formula is a bit long. You can add the OR function to your formula to make it quite a bit shorter:

=IF(OR(B1<A1*0.95,B1>A1*1.05),"out of limits","within limits")

You could make the formula shorter still by skipping the OR function and simply doing a comparison on the absolute difference between the values:

=IF(ABS((B1-A1)/A1)<=0.05,"within limits","out of limits")

Since there is division happening in this formula, it is possible that you could get an error if the value in A1 is 0. To avoid this potential problem, the formula should be modified slightly:

=IF(A1=0,"unknown",IF(ABS((B1-A1)/A1)<=0.05,
"within limits","out of limits"))

If the requirement is for the values to be "within 5% of each other," the calculation is slightly more complex:

=IF(ABS(B1-A1)/MAX(ABS(B1),ABS(A1))>0.05,
"out of limits","within limits")

In this case, the MAX function is used to determine the larger of the two values in A1 and B1. It must test the absolute values of A1 and B1 because the MAX function returns the value nearest to zero if both numbers are negative.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11116) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Determining If a Value is Out of Limits.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Changing Body Text to a Heading

When working on a document in Outline view, you may need to change regular body text to a heading in the outline. It's ...

Discover More

Copying Found Items to a New Document

Word allows you to use its searching capabilities to easily find multiple items in a document. What if you want to copy ...

Discover More

Consistent Spacing

It is a good idea to make sure that the spacing following each sentence in your document is consistent. Here's a handy ...

Discover More

Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!

More ExcelTips (ribbon)

Deriving High and Low Non-Zero Values

When analyzing your numeric data, you may need to figure out the largest and smallest numbers in a set of values. If you ...

Discover More

How Operators are Evaluated

Operators are used in formulas to instruct Excel what to do to arrive at a result. Not all operators are evaluated in the ...

Discover More

Totaling Across Worksheets

Want to sum the values in the same cell on a range of worksheets? It's not as easy as summing a range on the same ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is seven more than 3?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.