✔ Dummies.com online articles: Did you think I would leave you hanging without some extra material? Fear not! I have provided a few online articles to give your formulas and functions knowledge an extra lift! Find the articles at www.dummies.com/extras/excelformulasfunctions.
✔ Updates: I pour my heart and soul into my books – and so do the slew of editors working with me – yet still things can go awry. If there are updates or important changes, find them at www.dummies.com/extras/excelformulasfunctions.
Where to Go from Here
Roll up your sleeves, take a deep breath, and then forget all that preparing-for-a-hard-task stuff. Using Excel is easy. You can hardly make a mistake without Excel's catching it. If you need to brush up on the basics, go to Chapter 1. This chapter is also the best place to get your first taste of formulas and functions. After that, it’s up to you. The book is organized more by area of focus than anything else. If finance is what you do, go to Part II. If working with dates is what you do, go to Part IV. Seek, and you will find.
Part I
Getting Started with Formulas and Functions
In this part …
✔ Get to know formula and function fundamentals.
✔ Discover the different ways to enter functions.
✔ Understand array-based formulas and functions.
✔ Find out about formula errors and how to fix them.
Chapter 1
Tapping Into Formula and Function Fundamentals
In This Chapter
▶ Getting the skinny on the Excel basics
▶ Writing formulas
▶ Working with functions in formulas
Excel is to computer programs what a Ferrari is to cars: sleek on the outside and a lot of power under the hood. Excel is also like a truck. It can handle all your data – lots of it. In fact, in Excel 2016, a single worksheet has 17,179,869,184 places to hold data. Yes, that’s what I said – more than 17 billion data placeholders. And that’s on just one worksheet!
Excel is used in all types of businesses. And you know how that’s possible? By being able to store and work with any kind of data. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in finance or sales, whether you run an online video store or organize wilderness trips, or whether you’re charting party RSVPs or tracking the scores of your favorite sports teams – Excel can handle all of it. Its number-crunching ability is just awesome! And so easy to use!
Just putting a bunch of information on worksheets doesn’t crunch the data or give you sums, results, or analyses. If you want to just store your data somewhere, you can use Excel or get a database program instead. In this book, I show you how to build formulas and how to use the dozens of built-in functions that Excel provides. That’s where the real power of Excel is – making sense of your data.
Don’t fret that this is a challenge and that you may make mistakes. I did when I was ramping up. Besides, Excel is very forgiving. It won’t crash on you. Excel usually tells you when you made a mistake, and sometimes it even helps you correct it. How many programs do that? But first, the basics. This first chapter gives you the springboard you need to use the rest of the book. I wish books like this were around when I was introduced to computers. I had to stumble through a lot of this.
Working with Excel Fundamentals
Before you can write any formulas or crunch any numbers, you have to know where the data goes and how to find it again. I wouldn’t want your data to get lost! Knowing how worksheets store your data and present it is critical to your analysis efforts.
A workbook is the same as a file. Excel opens and closes workbooks, just as a word processor program opens and closes documents. When you start up Excel you are presented with a selection of templates to use, the first one being the standard blank workbook. Also there is a selection of recent files to select from. After you open a new or already created workbook, click the File tab to view basic functions such as opening, saving, printing, and closing your Excel files (not to mention a number of other nifty functions to boot!). Figure 1-1 shows the contents presented on the Info tab.
Figure 1-1: Seeing how to use basic Excel program functions.
Start Excel and select to open a blank workbook. Double-click the Blank Workbook icon and you're ready to go. When you have more than one workbook open, you pick the one you want to work on by selecting it on the Windows Taskbar.
A worksheet is where your data actually goes. A workbook contains at least one worksheet. If you didn’t have at least one, where would you put the data? Figure 1-2 shows an open workbook that has two sheets, aptly named Sheet1 and Sheet2. To the right of these worksheet tabs is the New Sheet button (looks like a plus sign), used to add worksheets to the workbook.
Figure 1-2: Looking at a workbook and worksheets.
At any given moment, one worksheet is always on top. In Figure 1-2, Sheet1 is on top. Another way of saying this is that Sheet1 is the active worksheet. There is always one and only one active worksheet. To make another worksheet active, just click its tab.
Guess what’s really cool? You can change the name of the worksheets. Names like Sheet1 and Sheet2 are just not exciting. How about Baseball Card Collection or Last Year’s Taxes? Well, actually Last Year’s Taxes isn’t too exciting either.
The point is, you can give your worksheets meaningful names. You have two ways to do this:
✔ Double-click the worksheet tab and then type a new name.
✔ Right-click the worksheet tab, select Rename from the menu, and then type a new name.
Figure 1-3 shows one worksheet name already changed and another about to be changed by right-clicking its tab.