Using the Help Files in Microsoft Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Gary for Expert Village; as we saw before there are so many functions in Excel that we really could use a good explanation of what all these functions do and even some of the common ones we might need some help in understanding how they work and when we go and click on the function key next to the formula bar we see a whole long list of our formulas. I have a smaller list here because it is set to show only those recently used but if I go ahead and click on the “all formulas” I see that there is a very, very long list and if I ever need help in finding out how that particular formula works. Say averages, I would go and click on “average” and it gives me a small explanation here, it’s says; “returns the average which is translated as (arithmetic mean) of its arguments, which can be numbers or names, arrays, or references that contain numbers and so on. So if we need help and actually want to see some examples of how this formula works we click on the help key and we have our Microsoft Excel help window open up and we see our title is average. That is our formula that we were looking for and it gives a much more detailed explanation and if we scroll down a little bit we actually see that there are ways to use the formula, so we know how to, which syntax to put in to use this formula. In this case we would put equal, average, which is the name of the formula we are looking for, telling, telling Excel to take the average of the numbers that appear between these cells because we have A2 and we have a colon in-between and that means through A6. That series of cells, that group of cells, we would be taking the average of all the values in that cell. So here is a nice way, it’s very important to, in a, in explaining how to use Excel, it wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t show you how to really get this help menu because we are always, even the people who have a lot of experience with Excel are always looking for help because they forget how to use each individual formula within Excel. So it is always, it’s always nice to know that by a click of a button you can get a nice explanation and some examples of how to use each type of formula listed in Excel. "