Now let’s work with some built-in functions that Microsoft Excel offers to make life easier
on us once again. If we take a look at the formulas tab, we can see a functions library.
I just really want to get across in the video the use of functions, but it will be up to
you to take a look at all the functions Excel offers an take a look at what’s appropriate
for whatever you’re trying to do with Microsoft Excel.
For our example, we want the average retail cost. So I’m going to give it a label here. And I’m going to slide
this over. In the cell B9, what I want is an average of whatever data lives
in D5, D6 and D7. What I want to do is use one of Excels preexisting functions. And the
function I want to use is the AVERAGE function. I drag across the cells that have the data
that I want the average of and when I’m finished, I press enter and Excel produces the average
of those cells. Now let’s take a look at another example.
Let’s see. Let’s say I want a summation of the cost of the three products, so total
cost. I’m going to click in the cell where I want the sum to appear. Go up. Click sum,
and I can see that Excel will compute that cost for me.
I want to show you one last thing. I want to show you how to see those formulas. We
have a spreadsheet here that has quite a few calculated fields in it. We don’t always
want to have to go in and click in the cell and view the formula bar in order to know
the formula which calculated that result. An easier way to get to the formulas is simply
to go to the formulas tab and slide over to the show formulas option under formula auditing.
If you click that button, Excel is going to display all formulas in the sheet.
So hopefully this gives you information on how to write your own formulas as well as
use the preexisting functions that Excel has to offer you.
