Topic outline
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Microsoft Excel is a popular tool for managing data and performing data analysis. It is used for generating analytical reports, business insights, and storing operational records. To perform simple calculations or analyses on data, we need Excel formulas.
Even simple Excel formulas allow us to manipulate string, number, and date data fields. Furthermore, you can use if-else statements, find and replace, mathematics and trigonometry, finance, logical, and engineering formulas.
Unlike programming languages, you will be writing the formula name and arguments. That’s it, nothing complex. You can also use Excel-assisted user interference to add formulas.
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What are Excel formulas and functions?
Excel is used to calculate and manipulate numbers and text. To do this, you use formulas!
Formulas are expressions that tell Excel what you want to do with the data. They begin with the equal symbol (=) followed by a combination of operators and functions.
What are operators?
These are symbols that specify the type of calculation you want to perform on the elements of a formula. For example, to add two numbers, you can type “=1+1” into a cell. Once you hit Enter, Excel will run the formula and return the result which is 2.
Here are some examples of common operators:
Excel automatically treats cell contents that start with (=) as formulas. This also applies when you begin a cell with the plus (+) or minus (-) symbols.
You can bypass this by adding a leading apostrophe (‘). This is how you can show formulas as text like in the table above.
Order of operation and using parentheses in Excel formulas
Generally, Excel follows PEMDAS when calculating formulas. PEMDAS means parentheses first, then exponents, then multiplication and division, then addition and subtraction.
What are functions?
These are predefined processes in Excel. Each function in Excel has a unique name and specific input(s). The function takes these inputs and performs the corresponding calculation.
The inputs or arguments of an Excel function are always enclosed in parentheses.
For example, this is the syntax for the MAX function:
=MAX(number1, [number2], …)
The list of numbers where you want to find the maximum value is placed inside the parentheses.
Alright! You’ve just learned how a function in Excel works.
Let’s dive right into the list! 🤿
We will start with basic Excel functions and then move on to more advanced functions.
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In this next section, you will see how Excel can also be used to manipulate text.
In the “Class List” worksheet of the practice workbook, the full name of each student is listed in Column A. Your goal is to rearrange these from “first name last name” to “last name_first name” in Column F.
To do this, you first have to extract the first name and the last name from Column A.
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In this final section, we will focus on functions that allow you to look for specific data points and refer to them.
Take a look at the “Schedule” worksheet.
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