Use of curly bracket

[Russman]

Hi,

I have used array formulas for many years and am familiar with how they work.

A few weeks ago I was wanting to use an array formula to count items that were less than an amount (say -1) and greater than and amount (say 1 for simplicity) I was rather stuck until I found something, although I now can't remember where.

THe formula was

=SUM(COUNTIF(T2:T3450,{">1","<-1"}))

which gave exactly what I need. What I'd like to understand is the use of the curly bracket here and what it does? As if you change them for regular brackets it doesn't work?

Many thanks,

Russ

 

[Jared_8878]

From Aladin:
http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/Formulas/22859.html

The only time you enter these curly brackets yourself is when you feed some function a constant array as argument as in

=VLOOKUP(A1,{"a",1;"b",2;"c",3},2,0)

where {"a",1;"b",2;"c",3} represent a 2-column table.

Curly brackets are thus associated with the so-called array formulas and constant arrays.