- [Instructor] You can create your own formulas
to perform Excel calculations.
You can also use a built-in Excel function.
To get started creating formulas,
place your cursor inside 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 you can see that it's highlighted
and cell A3 is listed in blue
because it's going to be calculated programmatically.
Now, I can always type my equal sign
and just put in the value of the cell itself.
For example, A3.
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 ask for the value of cell B1.
It even knows it's text.
Remember, it's left aligned like text,
whereas before it was right aligned.
We can also do calculations.
I'll put in my equal sign,
and now I'm looking for cell A1
minus cell A2.
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 between an open and close parentheses.
We still start with an equal sign.
We always start with that,
even if we're using an Excel function,
and now I'm going to use the function SUM,
so I'll 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, I can see here
that it needs all the numbers separated by commas,
and it's asking for that first number because it's in bold.
What I'm going to do is click and drag
to select all the numbers that I want to calculate.
That's one way that I could do it.
I'll put in my closed parentheses,
and the colon in between
means that it's doing a block or a range of numbers,
Cell A1 through A5.
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.
There's an A with a colon and another A,
that means the entire column.
I'll close my parentheses, hit Enter,
and there's the value.
And I could always just put in different numbers.
For example, I can just SUM cell A1 and A2.
And in fact, if I wanted to,
I could even add a plus one to that.
As you can see, by the helper text,
you can keep going
as long as those numbers are separated by commas.
As far as the values of the cells,
I don't need to know what they are,
I only need to know where they are.
So I'll close my parentheses, 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 a certain function,
it's going to tell me what it does.
I can do calculations on dates,
time, money, currency, everything.
There's an extensive library.
The most commonly used ones,
however, are over here on the right side in the Home tab,
and I'm going to be going over those next.