Microsoft Excel Formulas and Tips (*)
Microsoft Excel is more than a spreadsheet processor. There are limitless things you can do with Excel. This program is important for managing your money, timetables and life in general. Sadly, not many people use Excel, and the ones who do don’t know the full potential of the program. In my opinion, and numerous other computer teachers, the most important skill you can have in Excel is learning some basic “formulas”. Some may find the following boring. I, however, find it very interesting and useful once you learn the skills.
Excel is more than inputting numbers and words into each cell. It can count and add/subtract/multiply/divide anything for you. You do this by typing in formulas. Anything with “=” in the beginning is called a ‘formula’.
There are many ways of adding 2 numbers together. This is the most useful one. Say we want to add 3 and 5 together. Click any cell, and type in (without the quotation marks) “=sum(3,5)” and press enter. And up comes 8.
If you happen to have 2 or more numbers already on the page, you can input “=sum(*click and drag to highlight all the cells*)”. When you highlight the cells, it’ll input something like D1:F4.
Need to put in the date of today? Type “=today()” This will also change to the current day everytime it is opened.
How many cells have numbers in them? Use the “=count( )” formula. As seen in the picture below, the cell A3 is the result from the formula. Note, it does not count letters/words, only numbers.
I’ll conclude today’s tutorial with a slightly harder one. It is based off of the previous formula. But what if we want to see how many cells are in a certain area that have a higher value than…4. To do this, we use the “=countif” formula. Lets reset the cells and make a new range to experiment with. As we know from the previous lesson, it does not count letters or words.
Now, lets input the “=countif” formula. According to Excel, for this formula to work we need to input “=countif(range, criteria)”. This means we first need to tell it what cells you want it to search. Then, input a comma and put in what it needs to meet (in our case, larger than 4.)
Now that we’ve selected what cells to search, lets put in the criteria.
Please take note of the quotation marks around the criteria. We need this to work. Without these, when you try to enter it it’ll say there’s an error and want you to fix it. Now we’ve pressed enter, lets see if it’s correct.
I put an X and green box beside the ones that were greater than 4. Excel was correct, there were only 3 cells that were greater than 4. Note that Z was not counted and 3.9 didn’t count. If I had a 4 in there, it would not increase the count either because the criteria says it must be greater than 4.
On a side note. I remember in elementary and middle school we would spend our computers period trying to get to the bottom and right-most cell. Of course, scrolling through it is impossible. But, we can do this with an empty spreadsheet. Highlight any cell, and hold ctrl (control) and press down, then right (with the control key held down). Control+Arrow Key allows us to go to the next occupied cell in the direction of the arrow, but since there are none, then it will go to the bottom of the page. If only I knew this in middle school…
I am not sure if I want to continue with Excel Formula tutorials. I could venture on into Powerpoint or more Word, as for school purposes Excel is used very minimally. Though this is a useful skill in my eyes, you may think otherwise. If you want to request a tutorial on any Microsoft programs or another one (if I can get my hands on it) please post it in the comments section below.
