“Kuh-, those SUMIF bastards are unforgivable! I’ll kill them all!”
I vented my emotions as I stood in front of an elongated humanoid creature that seemed to have come from a Ghibli movie.
##########################
For some reason, Inoue, Saito, and I had been assigned to work on a spreadsheet for the advertising industry, my old work industry.
It was a nostalgic sight. Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all had their data pasted onto spreadsheets and a summary table had been made using SUMIFS over Daily/Creative/Targeting columns. Templates were different for every company and the usage of functions and overall spreadsheet compositions were also different.
Seen from the perspective of a worker, it was beautiful, efficient, and well made. The spreadsheets had perfectly named ranges and the order of the SUMIFS conditions were perfect as well. This was the kind of work I wish I could have done.
On the other hand, there were spreadsheets that felt dangerous just to look at. Row aggregation ranges would be restricted, like A2:A1000. If you made a spreadsheet like that, you would definitely end up submitting the wrong aggregate values to the client if the original data exceeded 1000 rows. There would also be repeated aggregates where values would be referred to multiple times. If you had to take over without knowing anything, errors would occur at some point and it would take a long time to find the cause.
That would just be the beginning. If there weren’t any functions, I would start to become scared that the data was just manually typed in. It would be inefficient and the users would have a hard time. However, as workers, we were free.
That said, that was not the point, it was the SUMIF’s. I was wondering who would use such a function, but it was surprisingly used here. Why don’t they just use SUMIFS instead?
Their relationship wasn’t like VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH. SUMIF was backwards compatible with SUMIFS. SUMIF can only aggregate under one condition. On the other hand, SUMIFS can aggregate over one or more conditions. For that reason alone, there was no need to use SUMIF.
The most frustrating part was that the parameter orders were reversed. The description for the format of SUMIFS was as follows.
=SUMIFS(Total Range, Condition Range 1, Condition 1, [Condition Range 2, Condition 2, …])
If more conditions were needed, they would be continued with [Range N, Condition N]. Meanwhile, the SUMIF format was like this.
=SUMIF(Range, Condition, [Total Range])
This may require some explanation. First of all, the total range is arbitrary. I didn’t like this at all. If not provided, the range was just as is. It was hard to accept that the two descriptions were for compatible functions. When the total range was provided, arranging both SUMIFS and SUMIF with one condition, the problem became clear.
=SUMIFS(Total Range, Condition Range, Condition)
=SUMIF(Condition Range, Condition, Total Range)
The total range and condition range were reversed! Was it fine to have such a complicated system? I couldn’t accept this at all.
As a worker, SUMIF and SUMIFS were also surprisingly similar. They both had long, Ghibli-esque hands and eyes that look like black holes with nothing else on their face. The only difference was that SUMIFS had a 50cm long tail waving behind them.
Basically speaking, they were quite fellows. They hardly moved from their cells. If you tried to process them, they would slowly back away. But, if you stepped in and closed the distance in one go, you could easily handle them.
If there was just one problem, it was that those fellows were aware of the workers around them and always their front towards them as they swayed around. In other words, their tails were hidden by their bodies, making it very difficult to tell if they were a SUMIF or SUMIFS.
I thought I had gotten used to it after handling several of them.
“SUMMIF-!”
Normally the function would be blown away and collapse, disappearing into the cell, but instead, it was I who was blown away and collapsed.
When I got up and looked in front of me, the one that I thought was a SUMIF turned out to be a SUMIFS, who had been hiding its tail behind its back. The back of its eyes were glowing red and its mouth, which should have been closed, was wide open. It was slumped over, seemingly reading to attack at any moment.
SUMIFS, my favourite function. It was now turning on me in an almost literal sense. I’m never going to forgive SUMIF for tearing me and SUMIFS apart.
※Functions
SUMIF https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093583
SUMIFS https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3238496