SUMIFs with a Partial Match. Now that adds up!

So let's say you're dealing with a list of bank transactions. You can see that you're spending a lot on a certain site, but the ID included with every description is causing your analysis to get a little tricky!

Today we have a list of transactions, and we're trying to figure out how much money was sent thru PayPal:

We can actually use the SUMIFs formula, but we'll need to search for Partial Matches. i.e. if the Description Starts with "PayPal", we'd like it to be included, regardless of what may come after.

Doing this is simple. We'll start off with a basic SUMIF formula:

=SUMIFS(sumRange, criteriaRange1, criteria1....)

In our case, we're looking to SUM the C column, and we're looking for matches in the B column:

=SUMIFS(C:C,B:B,

Now in our criteria, we don't want to look for something exact, rather any description that begins with PAYPAL. To do this, we'll simply write a * after PayPal. So our formula will be:

=SUMIFS(C:C,B:B,"PAYPAL*")

And there you have it!

Kind of wild right? Well, maybe because * and ? are used as WILDcards in Excel. But let's talk about that another day.