Alexander Michael - 101 Ready-to-Use Excel Formulas

101 Ready-to-Use Excel Formulas

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014935514

ISBN 978-1-118-90268-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-90259-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-90289-9 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Authors

Michael Alexander is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) and the author of several books on advanced business analysis with Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel. He has more than 15 years of experience in consulting and developing Microsoft Office solutions. Mike has been named a Microsoft MVP for his ongoing contributions to the Excel community. In his spare time, he runs a free tutorial site, www.datapigtechnologies.com , where he shares Excel and Access tips.

Dick Kusleika has been awarded as a Microsoft MVP for 12 consecutive years and has been working with Microsoft Office for more than 20. Dick develops Access- and Excel-based solutions for his clients and has conducted training seminars on Office products in the United States and Australia. Dick also writes a popular Excel-related blog at www.dailydoseofexcel.com .

Dedication

Mike Alexander

To my 12 fans at datapigtechnologies.com.

Dick Kusleika

To my Excel protgs, Kim and Jodene.

Authors Acknowledgments

Our deepest thanks to the professionals at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. for all the hours of work put into bringing this book to life. Thanks also to Mike Talley for suggesting numerous improvements to the examples and text in this book. Finally, a special thank you goes out to our families for putting up with all the time spent locked away on this project.

Publishers Acknowledgments

Senior Acquisitions Editor: Katie Mohr

Project Editor: Susan Christophersen

Copy Editors: Susan Christophersen and Virginia Sanders

Technical Editor: Mike Talley

Editorial Assistant: Claire Johnson

Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case

Project Coordinator: Erin Zeltner

Chapter 1: Introducing Excel Formulas

Microsoft Excel is, at its core, a calculation engine. Like a calculator, it accepts a question (such as 2+2) and gives you an answer. When youre working with a calculator, these questions are called mathematical operations. In Excel, you call these formulas.

Excel allows you to use formulas to perform not only mathematical operations but also a myriad of other complex actions, such as parsing textual values, searching for certain values in a range of data, performing recursive calculations, and much more.

To leverage the full power of Excel formulas, you need to understand how Excel formulas work as well as some of the ground rules for working with formulas. The goal of this chapter, therefore, is for you to get acquainted with the fundamentals of using Excel formulas.

Feel free to skip over this chapter if you already have a solid understanding of formula mechanics and want to get right into real-world examples, which start in Chapter .

You can download the files for all the formulas at www.wiley.com/go/101excelformula .

Creating and Editing Excel Formulas

An Excel spreadsheet is simply a collection of cells that you can use to enter data. Each cell is given a name based on its position in the spreadsheet. The top-leftmost cell is called cell A1. Its the cell located in column A, row 1. When you enter a value in cell A1 (for example, the number 5), that cells value becomes 5. If you enter the number 10 in cell B1, that cells value becomes 10. You can use then use these values in a formula.

For instance, you can click cell C1 and begin typing =A1+B1, as shown in Figure . Note how you can see your formula in both the cell youre typing in and the Formula Bar above the column headings.

Figure 1-1: Entering a basic formula.

After you press the Enter key on your keyboard, Excel recognizes what youre asking and performs the calculation that gives you the result of 15 (5+10 = 15).