Excel's logical operators

So, you've mastered Excel's TRUE and FALSE functions, and are now ready to use them with more complex statements. It's time to learn about logical operators in Excel.

Logical operators help Excel evaluate various statements of truth. But the equals sign is just the beginning. We can also evaluate statements using a number of other operators, including greater than, less than, and not equal to.

List of operators

Check out the Excel's full list of operators on the table below.

Let's look at some examples, which use the less-than, greater-than, and greater-than-or-equal-to, and not-equal signs to pose questions to Excel about the truth of various mathematical statements:

=(6>3)
Output: TRUE

=(6<3)
Output: FALSE

=(3>=3)
Output: TRUE

=(3<>3)
Output: FALSE

=(3<>6)
Output: TRUE

Operators within more complex formulas

We can also use operators to evaluate truth within more complex formulas. Consider, for example, the following:

=(9 > SUM(1, 2, 3))
Output: TRUE

This formula first evaluates the SUM of 1, 2, and 3, which is 6. It then checks to see if 9 is greater than 6. Since it is, the whole formula evaluates as TRUE.

Here are a few more examples of TRUE and FALSE statements with operators in more complex formulas. See if you can work through each one to figure out why the output makes sense.

=(SUM(5, 5) = SUM(3, 7))
Output: TRUE

=(SUM(3, 9) <> SUM(6, 6))
Output: FALSE

=(AVERAGE(10, 15, 20) >= SUM(10, 5))
Output: TRUE

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