February 4, 2026•1 min read•from Microsoft Excel | Help & Support with your Formula, Macro, and VBA problems | A Reddit Community

Why do some functions use 2 arguments for criteria range and criteria, and others merge them into 1 argument?

I am forever forgetting which functions need to be structured in which way. For example,

SUMIFS uses SUMIFS(Range, Criteria Range 1, Criteria 1)

FILTER uses FILTER(Range, Criteria Range 1 = Criteria 1) instead of FILTER(Range, Criteria Range 1, Criteria 1)

Why?

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