Often when you're using Excel to work with numerical data, you want to determine how certain values in particular cells compare to other values. You can use the less than or equal to Excel function and its relatives to do these kinds of comparisons and either store the result of the comparison directly or use it to influence other data in your formula.
Less Than or Equal To in Excel
Video of the Day
Less than or equal to, less than, greater than, and greater than or equal to Excel functions exist to help you compare numerical data or see how plain text compares alphabetically.
Video of the Day
You can usually use standard notation for comparisons in Excel. For example, the greater than or equal to Excel operator is written as ">=" and the greater than operator is written as ">". One unusual case is the not equal to function, which is written as "<>". The same functions are also available in other popular spreadsheet programs such as Google Sheets.
If you use the operators in a formula by themselves, they return "TRUE" or "FALSE" depending on whether the condition turns out to be true or false. For example, the formula "=A1>B1" returns TRUE when the value in cell A1 is greater than the value in cell B1 and FALSE otherwise, and the formula "=A1<=5" returns TRUE when the value in A1 is less than or equal to 5 and FALSE otherwise.
Excel IF Statements
Sometimes, you want the result of a formula to be calculated one way or another based on how a numerical comparison turns out. You can use Excel's IF function to make this happen.
To know how to write greater than or equal to in an Excel IF function or use any other comparisons in that situation, remember that the IF function takes three values. The first is an operation that returns TRUE or FALSE, the second is the result the function should give if the answer is TRUE, and the third is the value it should give if the answer is FALSE.
For example, IF(A1>B1, A1, B1) returns the value in cell A1 if it's greater than the value in cell B1. Otherwise, it returns B1. Similarly, IF(A1>5, A1, B1*5+C1) returns the value in A1 if it's greater than 5 and otherwise returns five times the value in B1 plus the value in C1. Normal arithmetic rules about order of operations apply.