This article gives you the one distinction that sorts out Excel's whole IF family, and ends the specific confusion where you try to make IF produce a total and cannot work out why it will not.
IF works on one row and writes an answer into that row. Give it 82,956 rows and you get 82,956 answers, one each. It is a labelling tool: it builds a column. COUNTIF, SUMIF and AVERAGEIF look across every row and hand back one number. They build nothing. They answer a question. They are measuring tools.
The short version. Ask one question before typing: am I writing something into every row, or producing one number? Labelling, use IF. Measuring, use the IF family. The names are cousins. The jobs are opposites.
Both examples are the real ones from the build behind this series: the Segment column that labelled 82,956 games, and the KPI row that measured them. Every number was re-run against the file before publishing.
The confusion, named
