That is because it is matching one row off. For instance, say M3 said jones
and W2 was 1000 and W3 was 2000. The SUMIF would not match M3 against W3 and
return 2000, but against W2 and return 1000.

--
HTH

Bob Phillips

(remove nothere from email address if mailing direct)

"J Shrimps, Jr." wrote in message
...
Using a sumif formula to lookup
values in three colums.
Formula wuz "SUMIF(w2:w25000,"jones",m3:m25000)"

This formula produced results off by a factor of ten or twenty.
The formula should have read "m2:m25000"
I didn't think having one row "m1/m2" in the SUMIF
formula would make such a difference.
The variable "jones" didn't have any values in
the top 2000 rows, much less the first two.