CalCPA LAMBDA Article

Excel has a lot of useful functions: FILTER, SUMIFS, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUM, SUBTOTAL and more. All in, Excel has about 500 functions, so it’s likely there’s one that returns the result you need.

But now and again you may find yourself where there isn’t a built-in function that returns the value you are trying to compute. Or the result you need requires an extremely complex formula with tons of nested functions.

Historically, the solution was to create our own user-defined function using VBA. And we can still do that. But now we have another option. We can create a custom function from an Excel formula that uses the new—and much easier to implement—LAMBDA function.

To illustrate the LAMBDA function, we’ll create a custom function that does something that isn’t built-in to Excel: computing the fiscal quarter of any date. Check out the full article for the details.