Once Power Tools is added to your Google Sheets, go to the Add-Ons pull-down menu.

Power Tools has many powerful functions, but we’ll just take a look at its method of column comparing here. This is a fairly advanced formula and I’m not going to get deep into the weeds on how it works, but it will allow us to do some multi-column data comparisons. Comparing multi-column dataĬomparing data between two columns is fine and useful…but what if you have multiple columns of data and need to do comparisons? Well, Sheets can handle that as well, using a function called ARRAYFORMULA. If you see a blank cell then the formula returned nothing indicating the columns match.

Now for each row in which A and B are not identical, column C will contain the word “Mismatch”. This copies the formula in C1 into all the cells of column C. Left-click on the bottom right corner of cell C1 and drag downwards.The logic is this: if A1 and B1 are the same (i.e., A1=B1), the formula returns an empty string, and if they are not the same (A1 does not equal B1), the formula returns “Mismatch”. With data in columns A and B, highlight cell C1.

Open your Sheet on the page that you want to compare.This is fairly easy to understand, but hard to read in the formula, so let’s step through it. The first argument is the test to be performed, the second argument is the result to return if the test is not true, and the third argument is the result to return if the test is true. In the IF statement, there are three arguments. The IF formula is a powerful tool in Sheets (as well as in Excel).

Excel pivot chart comparing two columns