You have data for the year, product, region, and sales volume.

The data is not in pivot format.

If we want to calculate quickly the sales volume for product P1 in East region, we could create a pivot report. For cases like this, we can use D-functions. D-formulas are normal Excel functions like SUM, MIN, MAX or AVERAGE but with D prefix.

Let’s check an example.

The DSUM function has three arguments: database, field and criteria. The database means the data range, in our case that is B4:E20. The range includes also headers. The field is the field with facts or quantitative data. The field can be the order number from left to right, in our case sales is the fourth column. The field can be defined also by header name like =DSUM(B4:E20;”Sales”;G8:H9) would work also fine. We are calculating sales values.   We have defined two criteria: product and region. The product should be P1 and region East. Even though there is just one argument for criteria, we can define several criteria with one argument G8:H9.

In the same way, we can use DAVERAGE and DMIN.

 We have no data for product P3 for the year 2024. We have only two values for P2 in 2025, 19,2 is the smaller of the two values.

It is possible, of course, that we create a pivot.

The result is the same as DSUM. We can check also with Access

I loaded the data into Access.

SQL-query returns the same value.

DSUM is calculating correctly.

D-functions are useful, if you want to calculate few values from a table without setting up a pivot-report. If you need to calculate several values or do sensitivity analysis, then it is better to create a pivot-report.

There might be more D-functions in Excel in addition to what I have mentioned in this blog post.