Excel formula stop working after x number of rows

Question

Excel formula stop working after x number of rows

A similar question was posted 4 years ago. There were two answers. I have reviewed both. The first response is excellent but it is not the cause of my issues. The second answer was a statement that the person who responded had the same issue and what he or she did to solve it which will not work in my case. There was no explanation as to why the problem occurred.

Here is my problem. I am using the following formula:

IF(MONTH(MDB.xlsx!Date)=7,SUMIFS(MDB.xlsx!_910,MDB.xlsx!Activity,"MGRINC",MDB.xlsx!AcctNum,$Y202),0)

MDB is a Master Data Base. It currently has 214 rows but will grow substantially to probably around 5000 rows. The named ranges in the MDB are currently defined as rows 1 to 500. The above formula is in a spreadsheet, with about 300 rows. The formula works fine through row 201. From 202 on, it only returns zeros.

This is what I have done:

• I have looked at constituent parts of the formula using F9, all values and arrays are reporting correctly. (That's why the defined name range is currently set to only 500 rows, so I can breakdown a formula using F9 and not get an error after 8,192 characters.)
• If I move the line with this formula from line 202 to an earlier row, it works fine.
• If I delete earlier rows, the formula works fine.

This appears to be a memory issue of some sort but I don't understand why. I have built larger and much more complex spreadsheets some of which take minutes to calculate with no issues. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Extracting the Month inside a Sumif will not work. You could add two conditions, one testing for the date being greater/equal to July 1, the second testing for the date being smaller/equal to July 31.

=SUMIFS(MDB.xlsx!_904,MDB.xlsx!Date,">="&date(2020,7,1),MDB.xlsx!Date,"<="&date(2020,7,31),MDB.xlsx!Activity,"MGRINC",MDB.xlsx!AcctNum,$Y202)

Or, you could add a column to your source data that has the month number, then test for that month number

Or, you could change the formula to use SumProduct instead of Sumif, incorporating the month filter into the SumProduct parameters like this:

=Sumproduct((MONTH(MDB.xlsx!Date)=7),--(MDB.xlsx!Activity="MGRINC"),--(MDB.xlsx!AcctNum=$Y202),MDB.xlsx!_910)

With the formula just testing form Month number, the year is disregarded, so if you have data spanning multiple years, you may want to add a parameter that checks the year.

Note that all these formulas are regular formulas and do not need to be array entered.