Hi Angie,

There are a few more subtleties but what you've said is a good starting point.

The bottom line is that, in most situations, they're interchangeable and it's just down to the user's preference. But there are some occasions when it's better (or necessary) to use one or the other, including handling column headers (text), text within a sum range and matrices of different sizes.



It's also worth remembering that the "IF" and "IFS" functions (such as COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS) and database functions (DCOUNT, DSUM etc) are a lot faster to calculate than SUMPRODUCT, so you should use them when possible.