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The ability to quickly find the lowest three values in a set of data is an important skill to have when working in Microsoft Excel. This ability can help you to quickly and easily identify the outliers in a group of data or to compare different sets of information. Knowing how to find the lowest three values in Excel is also a great way to quickly assess the spread of a dataset and to observe trends in the data. In this article, we’ll look at how to find the lowest three values in Excel, along with a step-by-step example of how to do so.
You can use the following formula in Excel to find the lowest 3 values in a particular range:
=TRANSPOSE(SMALL(B2:B13, {1,2,3}))
This particular formula will return an array with the lowest 3 values from the range B2:B13.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Find Lowest 3 Values in Excel
Suppose we have the following dataset in Excel that shows the points scored by various basketball players:
Now suppose that we would like to find the lowest 3 values in the Points column.
We can type the following formula into cell D2 to do so:
=TRANSPOSE(SMALL(B2:B13, {1,2,3}))
The following screenshot shows how to use this formula:
From the output we can see that the lowest 3 points values are 11, 12 and 15.
We can manually verify that these three values are indeed the lowest in the Points column:
Also note that we could return these three values horizontally by dropping the TRANSPOSE function from the formula:
=SMALL(B2:B13, {1,2,3})
The formula now returns the lowest 3 values from the Points column horizontally instead of vertically.
In conclusion, the formula provided above can be used to find the lowest 3 values from a range of numbers in Excel. This formula can be easily adapted to return the highest 3 values or a different number of values, depending on the user’s needs. With this knowledge, users can quickly and easily analyze any dataset in Excel to find the desired values.