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This is one of the 33 lessons from the
Tutorial on Excel

Lesson 3-18: Functions Now Obsolete

Excel is more than 20 years old. Some functions that have been created in the earlier days of Excel are now obsolete because new functions that accomplish the same task and much more appeared.

I resisted the switch from Lotus 123 to Excel but I would never go back to it. The same applies to VLOOKUP. Try SUMPRODUCT and INDEX/MATCH and you will rapidly forget about the other functions.

Here is an example of how a function becomes obsolete:

There are two interesting function that most people know about MIN and MAX. They are used to determine the maximum or minimum value in a set of value. There there are LARGE and SMALL. These functions need on more argument to tell Excel if you want the first larger value in a set of values or the second, or the third.....

So:

MAX(A1:A32) will return the maximum value from cells A1 to A32 but you cannot determine the second largest value.
LARGE(A1:A32,1) will return the maximum value from cells A1 to A32, LARGE(A1:A32,2) will return the second largest value and LARGE(A1:A32,3) will return the third largest value....

Why keep MIN and MAX in your toolbox?

24a - Excel SUMIF Function
24b - Excel COUNTIF Function
24c - Excel HLOOKUP Function
24d - Excel LOOKUP Function
24e - Excel VLOOKUP Function

This is one of the 33 lessons from the
Tutorial on Excel