I've got four tables with negative and positive values and want to determine the largest magnitude of a subset of four values within those four tables. In other words if the largest magnitude is negative I want the negative value of the four subsets or vise-versa.

I've tried the following but got an error stating it was too long:

= IF(ABS(VLOOKUP(table1)) = MAX(ABS(VLOOKUP(table1)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table2)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table3)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table4))), VLOOKUP(table1), IF(ABS(VLOOKUP(table2)) = MAX(ABS(VLOOKUP(table1)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table2)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table3)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table4))), VLOOKUP(table2), IF(ABS(VLOOKUP(table3)) = MAX(ABS(VLOOKUP(table1)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table2)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table3)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table4))), VLOOKUP(table3), VLOOKUP(table4))))

The repeating line needs attention in my mind:

MAX(ABS(VLOOKUP(table1)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table2)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table3)), ABS(VLOOKUP(table4)))

Thanks