- [Instructor] You can create your own formula
to perform Excel calculations.
You can also use a built-in Excel function.
To get started creating formulas,
place your cursor in the cell,
and you always start with an equal sign.
This tells Excel that you're building a formula.
You can reference a different cell
by either clicking on it with your mouse,
here I can see that it's highlighted
and cell A three is in blue
because it was calculated programmatically.
I can always type my equal sign
and just put in the cell itself, for example, A three.
Excel will automatically highlight it,
which is a great visual cue for me to know
that I've got the right cell.
I can hit the Enter key and there's my calculation.
It doesn't matter if it's a number or if it's text.
For example, I'll put in my word apples,
and now I'll put in the value of cell B one.
It even knows it's text,
remember it's left the line like text,
whereas before it was right aligned.
We can do calculations,
I'll put in my equal sign,
I'm looking for cell A one minus cell A two.
I'll hit the Enter key,
and there's my value.
And I can also use a built-in Excel function.
Now this one's a little different
because I need the name of the function,
and then what's inside of it
is always in between an open and close at parentheses.
We still start with our equal sign,
we always start with that,
and now I'm going to use the function sum.
So I type that in,
and as soon as I put in my open parentheses,
Excel is going to open up some helper text.
It's telling me what parameters that function needs.
For example, it needs all the numbers separated by commas.
What I'm going to do is click and drag
to select all the numbers that I want to calculate.
This is one way I could do it.
I'll put in my close parentheses
and the colon in between means that it's doing a block
that is a range of numbers,
cell A one through A five.
I'll hit the Enter key,
and there's my sum.
If I wanted to do an entire column,
I could just click column A,
I'll click the whole heading,
and this one also looks a little bit different
as you can see, it's an A with a colon and another A.
That means the entire column.
I'll put in my close parentheses,
hit Enter and there's my value.
And I can always put in different numbers.
For example, I can just sum cell A one and A two.
So I'll put in A one, my first number,
and Cell A two is my second one.
I don't need to know what they are,
I only need to know where they are.
I'll hit Enter, and there's my sum.
If we head over to the formulas tab,
here's Excel's built-in function library.
For example, we can look at all these text functions,
we don't need to do functions on just numbers,
we can absolutely do them based on text strings.
If I hover my mouse over everyone,
it's going to tell me what it does.
I can do calculations on dates, times,
money, currency, everything, there's an extensive library.
The most commonly used ones, however,
are over here on the right hand side in the home tab,
and I'm going to be going over those next.