Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Finding the Absolute Row Number of an Item in a List

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Finding the Absolute Row Number of an Item in a List

In yesterday’s tutorial, I posted this example to return the relative row number of an item in a list.

Today’s example offers a formula to return the actual row number of an item in a given range, regardless of where on the worksheet that range is. Oftentimes, your range of interest will not start on row 1 of the spreadsheet, so it takes a formula with functions that can identify the actual row number of the item you are looking for, wherever that range may be on your worksheet.

In the picture below, cell H2 contains the formula…
=MATCH(MAX(F5:F15),F5:F15,0)+CELL("Row",F5)-1
…to return the actual row number (12 in this example) of the maximum number in range F5:F15.