Equal, Equal, Not Equal, Not Equal - How to Tell if Two Cells are the Same or Not The Same

About this Tutorial

Discover 4 easy ways to check if 2 cells in Excel are equal or not! Whether it's numbers, text, or dates, get the answer in seconds with simple tricks. Learn now in this video.

Sheet Resources

Access Sheet

Copy Sheet

Preview Sheet

Featured Formulas

EQ() NE()

Video Transcript

<div>0:00 Hello, welcome. In this video I'm sharing with you two ways to use equal and two ways to use not equal or to get, not equal or to get equals. 0:10 In this case we, we have some use cases, right? We have some cells that we wanna know are these two cells equal or in some cases are these two cells not equal? 0:20 There's actually two ways to do each one. There's two ways to do equals and there's two ways to do not equal. 0:26 And I wanna show you both ways.

So there's four different things we're gonna do and each one is going to come out either true or false. 0:32 So there's actually eight things, that's why you see eight things here. So we have these two columns, B and C, and we wanna know, are these two things true? 0:41 The first way we can do this is with the equal sign. So we type in equals and we don't have to use any formula , formula like pre-written here, you know, like this. 0:51 We can just type in B one and then we can use the equal sign and we can say C one. 0:57 And that alone will get you either true or false.

If you want to use numbers, you can use numbers and you can say, are these two numbers correct? 1:07 You can use dates And that's false and that's true, right? They're the same date. So you can use numbers, you can use text. 1:16 You can say, are these two things the same? If you use text and you say one and you use the number one, it's gonna be false. 1:22 Alright? Next one we can do. So we can do one, one that is true and it gives you resolves to either true or false. 1:31 The next way we can do this exactly the same thing, but we can actually use a formula .

Now what we do is we type the equal sign and we type eq. 1:41 That is the formula for equals we put up parenthesis and we can have one value and another value. So we can say, are these two values the same? 1:49 We can put strings here. So we can type in, in quotes two and two and we get true, but we can also select and reference other cells . 1:59 So we can say B one, C one.

Actually we should do b2, c2 cause we're in the second row, and that will resolve to either true or false. 2:11 If we change these, if we change this to the number three or the word three it will be false because three and two are not the same. 2:17 If we have numbers here, it will be either true or false. So we can type in three and it'll be thumb falls and we type in three and three and it's true. 2:27 All right, so now on the other side of things, how do we know if two two cells are different that we wanna know? 2:38 Like maybe they're same all the time.

We wanna know are they, are they different? So in first case, we can say equal sign B three and we're gonna use a, a less than symbol and then a greater than symbol and C three. 3:00 And so what you see here is that it results too true. If the two reference cells are not equal, the answer will be true. 3:09 Okay?

You might find this formatting or this kind of syntax inside of a very complicated formulas or combinations of formulas that you see online, especially if we're like looking up like different joins and splits and we're looking at different columns. 3:26 We want to find like an a blank one or the last one. This shows up a lot. And it's a really great way to see if two things are not equal to each other. 3:35 There's one other way to do that, which is with an actual filter or an actual formula , sorry.

And that's equals n e. 3:43 So we type in the equal sign n, the letters N and e, then a parenthesis, and we have two values and we can reference those the same as we did before B four b, c four n parenthesis. 3:56 And that will resolve exactly the same, either true or false. It will be true if the two items are not the same. 4:05 If the two, if the two cells contain two completely different texts, it will be true, it will resolve to true. 4:11 If they're the same, it will resolve to false. So we can say two and two and we get false.

And so we can have two and three here and it'll be true. 4:21 These are great ways to figure out if two cells are equal or not equal. And now you have like four options, right? 4:29 We can use text, we can use numbers, we can use dates, we can use decimals, we can also put in other cells here, reference other cells in these two things, create complex formulas and then say, are these two things the same? 4:43 This is really cool. And and, and it, and it's also four completely different ways.

We might not need the formula EQ or we might not need the formula any. 4:54 We can do it with just the greater than in, less than simple. And literally we can use just the equal side. 5:01 The only thing is we do need to put the equal sign at the beginning to know that this is a formula , but it doesn't have any text formula in it. 5:08 So that's really cool.

And I think it's really useful also when you're looking at and rocking and parsing through complex formulas that you may see on like Stack Overflow or even better sheets. 5:19 You might see some kind of complex formula that's includes this symbol, these symbols here. And now you know what that means. 5:26 It means that these two things are not the same. It's, it's saying true or false, they are not the same. 5:31 Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoy learning more about Google Sheets. Bye.</div>