Excel formula: For each instance of peak/bottom value in column, get range/distance to the second next peak/bottom

Question

I am looking to solve the following problem in Excel:

ID     Value   Distance
1      1       3
2      0       0
3      -1      3
4      1       0
5      0       0
6      -1      0
7      0       0

Essential the distance column is what I want. It looks at peak/bottom values(1 and -1), then scrolling down to find the second next peak or bottom and compute the distance. For example, for ID 1, since it is peak, we looking for the second peak/bottom, ID 3 should be skipped since its the first, so we look at ID 4 and get distance = 4-1 = 3

Answer 1

Try following formula:

=IFERROR(AGGREGATE(15,6,A2:$A$18/ABS(B2:$B$18),3)/ABS(B2)-A2,0)

Explanation:

AGGREGATE function with first two parameters 15 , 6 and last 3 returns the third smallest value in the array A2:$A$18/ABS(B2:$B$18) ignoring errors - in the first row after division the array looks like this [1, #DIV/0,, 3, 4, #DIV/0,, 6. #DIV/0.. ...] and returns 4 .

Next, this value is divided by the absolute value of column B of the current row (if we divide by 0, then we get an error and the IFERROR function returns 0).

Then we subtract the value of column A of the current row from the obtained result (in the first row 1 ) and we get the desired distance - 3

To get the third and subsequent values, increase the last parameter of the AGGREGATE function accordingly.