Thanks, Dave, I can't believe I overlooked such a simple solution! Your
suggestion worked perfectly. However, I still would like to know why the
NOT() and ISBANK() functions did not work. I also would like to know
exactly why the "<" format does work?

When a value is not specified, is this criteria comparing whether the value
is non-zero, non-text, or blank by default? I would like to understand
better how this criteria works so that I could use it under a variety of
circumstances.

Thank you so much for a great solution,

Richard

************
"Dave Peterson" wrote in message
...
You want to compare column A to non-blanks, right???

=SUMIF(A$8:A20,"<",B$8:B20)



Blue Max wrote:

We have been able to conditionally sum a column of cells (sum_range)
based
on the blank cells in another column (range) using
SUMIF(A$8:A20,"",B$8:B20). Nevertheless, we actually need to sum the
NON-BLANK cells in the sum_range column. How do we create a formula that
will sum the non-blank cells?

Please note that we have tried several iterations of the formula
'criteria'
argument including NOT(""), NOT(""""), "NOT("")", "NOT("""")", ISBLANK(),
"ISBLANK()", and so forth. We have most likely failed to understand the
proper syntax for the 'criteria' argument, but there surely must be a
criteria that will identify the non-blank cells, isn't there? Currently,
we
are subtracting the sumif result, for the blank cell criteria, from the
total of the column in order to find the difference. Unfortunately, this
is
a temporary and cumbersome work-around. We thank you for any help with
this
issue.

--

Dave Peterson