What is OR criteria in Excel?

Answer 1

You use the OR criteria when you want to be able to give a choice of options. Say you have a list of people working in different departments and you want to list people working in the Accounts department or the Sales department, then you would use the OR statement. You could be looking for people who are widowed or divorced from your marital status field as another example. So when you have 2 or more allowable criteria on the one field, you can use the OR criteria. It can also be used across different fields. It depends on what you want to do. If you use it carefully, it is very powerful.

Answer 2

The or is used when one or another criteria needs to be true, but not necessarily all. If not all criteria needs to be true, then you can use an or to test them. I you were looking at two exam marks and only one or other needs to be passed to get an overall pass, you could use an OR function in conjunction with an IF to check. Say the two marks are in cells B2 and C2 and the pass mark is 40%, then you could do this:

=IF(OR(B2>=40%,C2>=40%),"Pass","Fail")