Number Crunching 101: Functions, Formulas, and Ranges

Abstract

What makes Excel so powerful, and maybe even exciting, is its ability to bring something to the worksheet that wasn’t there before. Taking a column of sales figures and finding their average or determining the highest score on a test—automatically—is really what Excel is about. If all you’re doing is entering names and values on the worksheet without doing something to that information, you’re probably using the wrong application—sort of a souped-up Word, only with cells instead of paragraphs. Learning how to compose your own Excel formulas and use Excel’s built-in calculations, called functions, allow you to use some of Excel’s real potential.