Two of the main reasons to use Microsoft Excel are its ability to format data and to calculate mathematical equations. We’ll start off by looking at some basic examples of this – but once you’ve got to grips Excel, you can use it to perform some quite powerful calculations that will save you a lot of time working out sums manually! All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course in Brighton, Sussex.
Before we start, we first need to check that your Enter key is set to move one cell down when you press it. If this is not the case then you need to change your settings by clicking on the excel “options” button at the bottom of the Microsoft Office Button’s menu list:
Each cell in a spreadsheet can contain text, a number or a formula. A cell that contains a formula can be used to display the results of a calculation based on the numbers in other cells.
The benefit of this is that once you have entered a formula in to a cell, the results of the calculation will update automatically when you change the numbers in the cells the formula refers to. You don’t have to do a lot of manual calculations when your figures change.
This can sound complicated and daunting, so first lets take a look at the the basic calculations that are available:
