Additional Information:
This video shows how Excel formulas can be used to carry out complex data manipulations. As soon as you create long formulas, they can become difficult to interpret. Therefore, it is not always desirable to condense every logical step into a single formula.
In this tutorial, the arguments of the IF statement are copied and pasted from other simpler formulas. There is no reason why we cannot give these formulas their own columns in our data table. We could give them the headings "for two names" and "for three names". The idea would be to illustrate both possible outcomes before feeding them into our IF statement.
If we were to display these extra columns, the spreadsheet would appear untidy to an end user. We would probably hide them. There is always a balance to be struck between your spreadsheet's appearance and the ease with which you can develop it further.
One day, you may find yourself spending hours adapting existing formulas. At this stage, you should learn how to write macros. These are covered in our free Visual Basic training course. Alternatively, you can ask our consultants for help.
