Include inequality inside cell for IF formula condition

Hi All,

Not something I've ever come across. I'm trying to write an IF statement that considers a benchmark value input by the user. So, let's say we're looking at the price and quantity of widgets. A user could enter "20" in cell F5 and the formula might return the number of widgets with a price over 20. That's simple enough. But what if I wanted to let the user include the inequality in cell F5. Rather than typing "20" like in the previous example, the user in this instance would type ">20" or "<20" to get the count of widgets costing either more than or less than 20. Has anyone seen anything like this before?

If the inequality is in the cell (ex. ">=20"), excel reads that as text and doesn't evaluate the expression. So I tried parsing the inequality and the value seperately (ex. "<10" is entered in cell F5; IF(5&LEFT(F5,1)&RIGHT(F5,2),1,0)) but this also returns an error.

Hoping someone has other ideas!

Best,

Alex

Thanks for your reply, newdoverman. That's not quite what I'm looking for. Using the grid you provided, I'm looking to put an if statement in B3 that checks the value in A3 and evaluates to TRUE/FALSE depending on the condition in A1. Does this make sense?