I’ve found similar questions, but they’re all at least slightly different from my question, and have been unable to successfully adapt them, so here’s a simplified version of my sheet:
A B C D E
1 4 4 17
2 6 10
3 2 12
4 7 19
5 4 23
Column A is full of the integers 1-X. Column B is number of occurrences of Column A, and C is the sum of the values to the left and above. D is a random value between 1 and C5. So far so good. The problem comes with E1. I want it to give the value of A that is to the left of the C value that is the closest to D without going over.
Example: D comes up with the value 17. The closest value to 17 without going over is 12 (C3). Therefore, E equals 3. How would I go about achieving this? I can get the closest value using =INDEX(A$1:A$5,MATCH(MIN(ABS(F1-C$1:C$5)),ABS(F1-C$1:C$5),0)), but it comes to 4, instead of 3. How would I get the closest SMALL value? I’m guessing I have to replace ABS with SMALL, but I’m not sure how to go about doing that.
You can use the “vector form” of LOOKUP for this (see help for LOOKUP function). If you lookup D1 in C1:C5 you’ll get exactly the match you want (the largest value that’s smaller than or equal to D1) and then you can define the return vector as A1:A5 to get the corresponding value from there
=LOOKUP(D1,C$1:C$5,A$1:A$5)
Note: You’ll get an error for D1 values < 4 because in that case there’s no value “without going over”.
For this to work C1:C5 must be sorted ascending, but that will always be the case in this scenario
Edit: I believe this answers your question, as stated, but if you were looking for the 17th occurrence, in order then shouldn’t the result be 4? If that was the case then I think you could still use LOOKUP but column C would have to be set up differently
Answer：
In E1: =if(C1<=D$1,A1,"") and fill down.
In F1: =max(E1:E5). This is your desired result.
Tags: excelexcel
