Calculate the absolute sum in Excel

A colleague of mine asked me today how to go about using MS Excel formulas to calculate the sum of absolute values from a given dataset. This question crops up quite often on the forums so I thought I'd put together a quick blog post on it.

There isn't a built-in SUMABS() (or equivalent) worksheet function so you have to do a little bit of work to get the right answer.

Three options:

• Use a helper column.
• Use a SUM() array formula or SUMPRODUCT().
• Use SUMIF().