Populating text cells that show minimum value

Chris Kirsch

I am in the process of creating a sheet to populate low bidders.  I have two columns; vendors and total cost.  I've included a cell formula in the total cost column to automatically populate the low bid value :  =min(cell1, cell2, cell3, cell4, cell5).  My question is, how can I create a cell in the 'vendors' column to automatically populate the subcontractor who provided that low bid?  Is there a way to link the 'vendor' cells to their corresponding bids?  

 

Please help!

Shaine Greenwood

Hi Chris,

 

It's possible to do this if you're willing to treat your columns as a makeshift lookup table and use a combination of the INDEX, MIN, and MATCH functions.

=INDEX(Subcontractors1:Subcontractors5, MATCH(MIN(Numbers1:Numbers5), Numbers1:Numbers5, 0), 0)

 

NOTE: You'll need to adjust the cell references to the column names in your sheet. If you need to do this over an entire column, remove the cell numbers entirely, for instance =INDEX(Subcontractors:Subcontractors, ...)

More on functions can be found in our Help Center: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/775363-using-formulas