How to find the largest number in Excel

Those who are doing data analysis with the help of Microsoft Excel often need to find the largest number. It is a basic part of any data analysis.Today, in this article I will guide you on how to find the largest number in Excel in a given row, column, or range of cells.

I have prepared an Excel worksheet for practice. Let’s see it first.

Here, in this worksheet, there are six people and their monthly overtime hours. I will show you how to find the largest number using the Excel function. let’s get started.

How to find the largest number in Excel

To find the largest number in an array or a range of cells the most commonly used Excel function is MAX. Let’s see, how it works in our worksheet data.

MAX function has the following arguments

number1, number2- number1 is mandatory or required and subsequent numbers are optional. Excel can handle up to 255 numbers comparison.

You can add cells like number1, number2, number3 …………….. or as like range of cells. as for the above example we can say MAX(D5:D10) or MAX(D5,D6,D7,D8,D9,D10)

 Empty cells, logical values, or text in the array or reference are ignored. 

Now if we want to find the person who has done the maximum overtime how to find that? is it also possible in Excel? Yes, it is possible but not with the MAX function. We can use the formula combination of INDEX, MATCH, and MIN. Let’s see how it works.

See, I already find the person who has done maximum overtime. Let us know how this formula actually worked.

• INDEX function will look up the relevant data from another column.
• The MATCH function will find the value where the largest value is.
• MIN function will find the largest value.

How to find nth the large number in Excel

Sometimes, you may need the nth large value of a given number. Let’s say we have to find the 2nd highest overtime in our datasheet. How to find that one? Yes, We can use the LARGE function to find the 2nd highest overtime in our worksheet. Let’s see the syntax first.

Arguments for the SMALL function:

• array (required)- An array or range of numerical data from where you want to find the nth value.
• k (required)- The position (from the largest) you want to find from the array or range of numerical data.

To find the largest number:

To find the 2nd largest number:

To find the 3rd largest number:

Let us see how it works in our worksheet.

With the help of the LARGE function, you can sort all values from smallest to largest or largest to smallest numbers. Let’s check how we can do that.

Here we have used double quotations (“”) and a comma(,) to have space and commas between two numbers and ampersand(&) to join two texts.

Read More: How to add text in Excel formula

Can we find the smallest number in Excel?

Like finding the largest number we can also find the smallest number in Excel.  Here we have used the MAX and LARGE functions. Similarly, to find the smallest number we can use MIN and SMALL functions.

To learn to find the smallest number in Excel read the below content. I hope this will be helpful for you.

Read More: Find the smallest number in Excel

Dear Learners, I hope, this article is very much helpful and easy to digest. If you have any suggestions please feel free to post a comment below. I will try my best to reply to your comment. Thanks for being with Excelwrap.com.