Tips on Excel Formulas

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you some tips on Excel formulas. Let's go to our computer and open up Excel. Just click on the Start button. Let's go to All Programs, find Microsoft Office, and let's click on Excel. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by typing out some simple formulas here. Now, if you've never typed a formula, all you have to do to begin one is type an equal sign inside of a cell, and that's going to tell Excel that you are typing a formula. I'm just going to do a mathematical expression here by typing in 100 plus 100, and then just like a calculator, if I press Enter, I get the answer, 200. Now, if I highlight that cell, you can see that even though it's displaying 200 here, the actual value of the cell is this formula that I typed in -- 100 plus 100. Now, to do something a little more complex, all right, let's say we want to average out a series of numbers. Let me type a series of numbers: 10, 20, and 30. Now, to average those numbers, we're going to use the average function within a formula. So I'm going to click on this cell right here beneath the numbers and I'm going to type equals AVG, which means average. I'm going to open up a parenthesis. I'm going to select all those cells. Oh, apparently, it's not AVG, it's average, the word. So A-V-E-R-A-G-E. Now, what this has done is this has just added all of those cells up and divided by the total number of cells, which will be averaging. And as you can see, the result of that average is 20. Now, one tip that I'm going to show you here is if these numbers change, you'll notice that my average automatically changes as well. That's because these formulas are dynamic. If I have another series of numbers, I can copy this formula and paste it. And as you can see, this formula is now using these cells. Those are relative cells. That means I can copy between rows and columns, and it'll maintain what it's pointing to. So those are just some small tips about how to use and manipulate Excel formulas. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you some tips on using Excel formulas."