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Expert: Bill Hermanson - 11/6/2009


Question
Hello there.
I have a column of 366 IF statements designed to give me different hyperlinks on different dates in Excel 2007. I have set these up so that only the one that matches the current date is displayed, the rest return a zero. My problem is that I need one cell to update each day with the non-zero value. I've been tryind to find a way of finding the non-zero value in the column, then displaying it as-is in another cell. This seems a very simple task but it won't work for me unless I'm using numbers and use sumif.
Hope that makes sense, thanks for your time.

Answer
Andy,

  Take a look at MATCH and INDEX.  MATCH() can look down the column and return the row number (relative to the top of the column, not the absolute row number of the sheet) which contains the first number larger than 0.  

  If the non-zero value isn't a number, but is TEXT instead, you can add a column of =Cell<>0 functions, which will give TRUE or FALSE as a result. This equation may look funny but it will detect the sole non-zero value with a TRUE result; all the rest will be FALSE. Then use MATCH to find the sole TRUE (which is equal to 1). Finally, and INDEX can retrieve the actual sole non-zero value, by feeding the MATCH result in for the ROW parameter of the INDEX function.

  Hope this helps and is clear enough to get you going.

    >>> Bill
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Bill Hermanson

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