Excel Formulas: How To Sum The Top Or Bottom X Numbers in a List

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ALSO SEE: Sum Every Nth Cell

When you have a list of number in an Excel spreadsheet there are times when you may have to Sum only the top x numbers in the list. If the numbers are sorted then the task is a fairly straightforward Sum function including on the top, or bottom x cells. Often however this is not the case.

Lets say we have a list of number in the range A1:A100 and we have to sum only the 10 largest figures. We can do this by nesting the LARGE function into the SUM function as shown below

=SUM(LARGE($A$1:$A$100,{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}))

This is an array formula and must be entered via Ctrl+Shift+Enter

If we only needed the 5 largest, we would simply omit the numbers 6 to 10. If we needed to sum the 15 largest number we simply add number 11 to 15.

Should we need to sum the 10 smallest values in the list we could use

=SUM(SMALL($A$1:$A$100,{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}))

This is an array formula and must be entered via Ctrl+Shift+Enter

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