Being primarily designed as a spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel is extremely powerful and versatile when it comes to calculating numbers or solving math and engineering problems. It enables you to total or average a column of numbers in the blink of an eye. Apart from that, you can compute a compound interest and weighted average, get the optimal budget for your advertising campaign, minimize the shipment costs or make the optimal work schedule for your employees. All this is done by entering formulas in cells.
This tutorial aims to teach you the essentials of Excel functions and show how to use basic formulas in Excel.
The basics of Excel formulas
Before providing the basic Excel formulas list, let's define the key terms just to make sure we are on the same page. So, what do we call an Excel formula and Excel function?
Formula is an expression that calculates the value of a cell.
For example, =A2+A2+A3+A4 is a formula that adds up the values in cells A2 to A4.
Function is a predefined formula already available in Excel. Functions perform specific calculations in a particular order based on the specified values, called arguments, or parameters.
For example, instead of specifying each value to be summed like in the above formula, you can use the SUM function to add up a range of cells: