Hi,
I was viewing lesson 2.6 Product.
The instructor showed how to use Product(cell 1, cell 2, cell 3). In one of the examples, one cell has value "1" and the other cells were empty, and the result was 1. I was confused. I thought the result would be "0" since some cells were empty and hence the value should be "0". Am I not understanding it correctly with Product formula?
Hi,
That's the way the PRODUCT function works and is the reason to use it in this case rather than just multiplying the three cells together, which would result in 0.
Think of it this way, if you supply PRODUCT with a blank cell, it discards that cell/value from the calculation so PRODUCT(1 , BLANK , BLANK) = 1.
However 1*BLANK*BLANK = 0.
But if you only supply BLANK cells to PRODUCT then the result is 0 i.e. PRODUCT(BLANK, BLANK, BLANK) = 0
regards
Phil
Thank you for the clarification Phil.
Having been a hardware design engineer in my previous professional life, I have to say this Excel's PRODUCT function works totally different for the logic we apply, it is not intuitive to me until you explained it.
Yeah I know what you mean. I guess it was created to overcome the issue where you may need to multiply cells that may or may not contain a numeric value.
