SUMIF Won't Work for Me

[abrake]

I'm going absolutely batty trying to figure this out. SUMIF simply will not
work for me when I try anything that requires the criteria portion of the
function to be enclosed in double quotes, which completely defeats the
purpose of what I'm trying to accomplish. Here's the formula I would LIKE to
use:

SUMIF('VTI Distributions'!B2:B7,">=D4",'VTI Distributions'!C2:C7)

If I try the following, it returns a nonzero value:

SUMIF('VTI Distributions'!B2:B7,D4,'VTI Distributions'!C2:C7)

Note the only difference is that the criteria portion has been changed to
only sum for a certain value. If I change the criteria portion to "=D4",
this should return the same value as the above, but it is returning zero.

What the heck is going on?

 

[abrake]

Disregard. I think I've figured this out after sifting through some of the
other posts here. Seems I need to code the criteria portion as:

">="&D4

 

[JLatham]

Yes, that should fix it. In the original format the conditional was looking
for the cells to actually contain 'D4', not the contents of D4.