5 Complete Excel Formulas You Need to Know and Use in Your Day-to-Day Life

Microsoft Excel as we know is probably one of the most popular spreadsheet software available out there. But most people that are reading this article have probably never used Excel’s formulas and function in their work. We need to remedy that, and that will be done with our guide to the 5 complete excel formulas that will take your productivity to the next level.

So, without further ado, let’s just start with the number one

1. SUM

Now, even if you don’t use Excel in your day-to-day life that often, you should’ve at least heard about this formula. As its name implies, SUM is used to aggregates values from a selection of column or rows from the range that you selected.

Which if we’re to use the formula in an Excel spreadsheet, it would look something like:

=SUM(A1:A9)

What this block of formula means is that it will sums the values of rows A1 to A9, and then displaying the value of that sum to the cell of your choosing.

2. AVERAGE

Another formula in excel that you probably would’ve already heard is AVERAGE, which as its name implies, functions to get the average value of your selection and then displaying said value on a cell that you choose.

An example of it would be something like

=AVERAGE(B1:B10)

Which will take the average of column B1 to B9 and then displaying the value to the cell that you chose to write the formula on.

3. COUNT

Next up in our 5 complete excel formulas is the count function. To put it simply, this formula will count how many cells of your selection actually has data attached to it. It’s worth nothing that this formula only counts numeric value, so if you’re using it to count a selection that contains text, it will not be added to the overall count that you will be getting.

So, let’s say you have an entire column of B2 to B11 that consists of only number and you use the formula

=SUM(B2:B11)

It will show up as 11 because none of the cell were empty or have text in them, but if the columns are filled with a text, it will show up as 0.

4. COUNTA

The basic usage of this formula in Excel is the same with the one we’ve mentioned above, but unlike COUNT, COUNTA counts everything in a cell regardless of type, so it will count everything starting from numerics, dates, times, strings, and everything in between. Let’s give it an example

=COUNTA(B2:B11)

Thanks to use using COUNTA instead of COUNT we will still get a value that is accurate to the data provided, which is 11.

5. IF

4 out of the 5 complete excel formulas that we’ve mentioned above, they’re all pretty basic and easy to use. But IF is where it gets a little tricky. It’s often used when you want to sort your data according to a given logic. But, the best of IF is that you can incorporate it with other formulas in there, making it even more powerful as a formula.

For example:

=IF(C2<D3, ‘TRUE, ‘FALSE)

Means that Excel will check whether or not the value of cell C2 is less than D3 or not. And if it is, it will print TRUE on the cell you’re writing it on, and FALSE if it’s otherwise.

And that concludes it for our 5 complete excel formulas that you can use in your day-to-day work. After all, it is a very powerful tool and a very important tool for this day and age where everything is digital. That all from us, thank you for reading this article of 5 complete excel formulas, and we hope to see you again soon.