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Excel is a powerful tool that can be used to easily find and organize data. One of its useful features is the ability to find specific numbers within a column. To find the first 3 positive numbers in a column, you can use the “Sort” function in Excel. Simply select the column containing the numbers, then click on the “Sort” button and choose “Smallest to Largest” option. This will rearrange the numbers in ascending order, making it easy to identify the first 3 positive numbers. Additionally, you can use the “Filter” function to only display positive numbers in a column, making it easier to locate the first 3 positive numbers. By utilizing these functions, Excel provides a efficient solution for finding specific numbers within a column.
Excel: Find First 3 Positive Numbers in Column
Often you may want to find the first 3 positive numbers in a column in Excel.
For example, you might have a column of values in Excel and you’d like to return the first 3 positive numbers:
The following example shows how to do.
Example: Find First 3 Positive Numbers in Column in Excel
Suppose we have the following list of values in Excel:
Notice that some values are positive, some are negative, and some are zero.
To find the first 3 positive values in the column, we can first list out the numbers 1 through 3 in column C:
Next, we can type the following formula into cell D1 to find the first positive value in column A:
=INDEX($A$2:$A$14,SMALL(IF($A$2:$A$14>0,ROW($A$2:$A$14)-ROW($A$2)+1),C1))
We can then click and drag this formula down to cells D2 and D3 to find the second and third positive values in column A, respectively:
Column D now displays the first 3 positive values from column A: 9, 12, and 15.
Note that you can use this formula to find the first n positive values in a column.
For example, we could easily drag our formula down to more cells to list out the first 5 positive values from column A:
Column D now displays the first 5 positive values from column A.
Feel free to use this formula to list out the first n positive values from your own dataset.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel: