What does the OR function do in Excel?

Answer 1

OR(logical1, logical2, ...)

logical1, logical2, etc. are statements that can be true or false, they can be the words TRUE or FALSE, or they can reference cells which contain true/false conditions. The function can have anywhere from 1 to 255 of them, separated by commas. The OR function has a TRUE value if at least one of its logical conditions is TRUE. It can be used anywhere that you would use a true/false statement, like as the first parameter of the IF function.

Answer 2

The OR function is one of the logical functions in Excel. It used when testing more that one condition to see if any of these are true. It can hav eup to 255 arguments. So if you were testing for something like is someone earning over a certain amount of money or paying working a certain number of hours, you would need the OR function, in conjunction with an IF function to help you achieve this. By itself it returns TRUE or FALSE. If any of the tests are true it returns TRUE. The following one checks if 10 is less than 5 and is 6 less than 20. Obviously they are, so the function will return a TRUE value.

=OR(10>5, 6<20)

The following one checks if 20 is less than 15 and is 60 more than 42. Obviously only one of those things is the case, but the function will return a TRUE value, as only one must be true.

=OR(20<15, 60>42)

The following one checks if 40 is less than 8 and is 6 more than 35. Obviously neither one of those things is the case, so the function will return a FALSE value, as at least one must be true.

=OR(40<8, 6>35)

These are simple and obvious examples, using just two tests, but often you will be using values in cells which may or may not meet the conditions and could give different results.

=OR(A3>40, B3<10)