What are the odds that you’ll accidentally have a typo? Now imagine trying to do this 64 times with more complex conditions! Sure, it’s possible, but do you really want to subject yourself to this kind of effort and probable errors that will be really hard to spot? Another glaring issue is that you’ve had to enter the scores and equivalent letter grades by hand. It’s still functionally accurate and will work as expected, but it takes a long time to write and longer to test to make sure it does what you want. But here’s a thought – what if you need to segment the grades between A+, A and A- (and so on)? Now your four condition IF statement needs to be rewritten to have 12 conditions! Here’s what your formula would look like now: This particular example is relatively safe because it’s not likely that the correlation between test scores and letter grades will change, so it won’t require much maintenance. If the Test Score is greater than 59, then the student gets a D If the Test Score is greater than 69, then the student gets a C If the Test Score is greater than 79, then the student gets a B If the Test Score (in cell D2) is greater than 89, then the student gets an A This complex nested IF statement follows a straightforward logic: Examplesįollowing is an example of a relatively standard nested IF statement to convert student test scores to their letter grade equivalent. Let’s look at how to properly create a complex nested IF statement using multiple IFs, and when to recognize that it’s time to use another tool in your Excel arsenal. If you find yourself with an IF statement that just seems to keep growing with no end in sight, it’s time to put down the mouse and rethink your strategy.

Multiple IF statements can become incredibly difficult to maintain, especially when you come back some time later and try to figure out what you, or worse someone else, was trying to do. Unfortunately, the odds of you catching the 25% are slim. If you don’t nest your formula 100% accurately, then it might work 75% of the time, but return unexpected results 25% of the time. Multiple IF statements require a great deal of thought to build correctly and make sure that their logic can calculate correctly through each condition all the way to the end. While Excel will allow you to nest up to 64 different IF functions, it’s not at all advisable to do so. The value that you want returned if the result of logical_test is FALSE. The value that you want returned if the result of logical_test is TRUE. Use the IF function, one of the logical functions, to return one value if a condition is true and another value if it's false.

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