Numbers SUBTOTAL(MIN) function not ignoring other SUBTOTALs

I use SUBTOTAL(MIN, range) to get the smallest value in a fairly large range. There are other SUBTOTALs in that range and up until recently it worked fine, ignoring the other subtotals. Today it’s returning a SUBTOTAL. I don’t know if it stopped working with the last release of NUMBERS or if my data just never had one of the SUBTOTALs be a minimum value before. Is SUBTOTAL supposed to ignore other SUBTOTALs when using the MIN option (it does for the SUM option) or not?

Posted on Oct 1, 2026 8:19 AM

1 reply

Camelot

Level 9 (62,211 points)

Oct 1, 2026 11:22 AM in response to SeedyCharacter

Without seeing your table it's hard to be sure.. are you using categories or pivot to generate your subtotals?

Ordinarily, MIN() will return the lowest value in the given range. It doesn't generally care about what's behind those values (e.g. specific values, other functions, etc.).... indeed, it's not unreasonable to want a MIN() of subtotals in some cases (e.g. a subtotal for sales by month, then a MIN() to find your slowest month).

From what you've written I'm guessing you've just never had a subtotal that has been your MIN() value before.

The rules are a little different if you're using categories and/or pivot tables, since the category rows are excluded from ranges (e.g. MIN(B) will show the minimum value from column B, excluding any values in the category header rows), which is why I asked about the structure of your data.