The way I'd do this, rather than using IF, is to put each city and the
corresponding value for it in a separate table, say on a different worksheet.
That means you can refer to the table from as many rows as you like in your
home sheet, and also that you can easily update the table just once instead
of many times on the home sheet. VLOOKUP is the ticket for this method.

But if you really like IF functions, the only thing I see wrong with your
example is that you don't have quotes around the city names and do around the
values, just the opposite of what I think should be. Putting quotes around
the values makes them string values instead of numers, you see, and
apparently Excel thinks that multiplying a character string times D4 yields 0
as the proper answer.

--- "Bill R" wrote:
I want to use the IF function to perform a simple calculation. In cell C4 I
would enter one of three place names. In cell F4 I'd like the formula to use
a numeric value depending on the place name in C4. Then I'd like to use the
numeric value to perform a calculation involving other cells e.g.

If I enter Philadelphia into C4 Excel 2003 in F4 would use the value 0.50 to
multiply by a volume entered into D4, say 75000.
If ,however, I enter Baltimore into C4 the value to be used in F4 would be
0.75 then multiply that by D4 -75000.
If I enter Washington into C4 the F4 value used would be 1.00.

=IF(C4=Philadelphia,"0.50",IF(C4=Baltimore,"0.75", IF(C4=Washington,"1.00")))*D4

At the moment I'm getting an answer of 0 instead of 37,500 for Philadelphia;
56,250 for Baltimore and 75,000 for Washington.
The people using this spreadsheet should be able to enter a destination and
a volume to arrive at an overall rate.