OR() Function Challenge 1

Challenge yourself to apply the OR() function appropriately in a spreadsheet using logical functions to compare median income and housing cost values.

illustration of a spreadsheet comparing median income and housing cost values.

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Transcript(click to view)

Suzanne here. Welcome to Excel Intuition’s OR() Function Challenge 1 Video. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend you download your own copy of this workbook so you can try this on your own. We’re going to jump to the Median Housing Affordability worksheet. Now on this worksheet, we’ve established a situation for a What If Analysis. Basically asking, “Can somebody earning a median household income in 2021, afford the price of the median value of owner occupied housing, or median gross monthly rent?” And we’ve got a column here that we want to enter a function that will say TRUE if the person COULD afford to buy or rent, they can do one or the other, can they AT LEAST do one or the other?

And this doesn’t mean that they could do them both, where we put buy and rent in this column, could they have, could they freely choose to EITHER buy or rent, this means could they AT LEAST DO ONE of those. Could they afford buying? Or could they afford renting?

So in this case we’re going to use an OR() function.

And we’re going to say: is the income available for housing greater than or equal to the monthly housing expense to own?

OR is the income available for housing greater than or equal to the median gross monthly rent?

The question is: is AT LEAST ONE of these affordable for them?

And we see, in the US as a whole, it says TRUE.

In the city of Salinas, it says FALSE. Neither one’s available.

And in the city of Soledad it says TRUE. So let’s take a look at the results that we had here. We said the median income could afford to purchase a home in the U.S.? NO. In Salinas? NO. And Soledad? NO. So none of these is an option for somebody. But in the US as a whole, the person with the median household income or greater could afford to rent a property at the median gross monthly rental rate.

In the city of Salinas they couldn’t afford, a person with a median household income could not afford the gross monthly rental rate that is in the median range. In Soledad they could. So here, with our OR() function, we see that they can’t afford one of these options to buy or rent in the U.S as a whole. In Salinas, specifically, they can’t afford either one. And then Soledad, they CAN afford ONE of these options. And we can see that the option they can afford is the RENT. Now of course, this doesn’t mean that nobody can afford to rent in Salinas or buy.

It just means that according to the data we have here, and the assumptions we’ve made: someone earning an income at the level of the MEDIAN household income could not easily afford to purchase a home of the value at the MEDIAN level, or rent at the MEDIAN level, in the case of living in Salinas. They would have to be able to rent something that was LOWER than the cost of the MEDIAN value rental properties.

Thank you.