Summing by Criteria With SUMIF

A regular SUM adds every number in a range. But often you only want to add some of them. Imagine a sales sheet where column A holds the region and column B holds the amount. You do not want the total of all sales, you want only the East region total.

This is a conditional sum, and the function built for it is SUMIF. It adds numbers only when a matching condition is met, skipping the rest automatically.

SUMIF takes three pieces in order:

• range the cells to test against your condition
• criteria the condition to look for
• sum_range the cells to actually add up

So the spreadsheet looks through range, finds rows that meet criteria, and totals the matching cells from sum_range.