Excel Tutorial 01: Arithmetic Functions in Excel

Excel Tutorial 01: Arithmetic Functions in Excel

Intro to Excel

Excel's basic unit is cells and using this cell is what we make are called models for carrying out various analyses. These models can be optimization models, financial models, forecasting models. To start with all of these, one must have a basic knowledge of excel. Assuming that you know how to use Excel, I am gonna straight away start with a formula and with subsequent blogs, I 'll try to cover tables, graphs, validation, formatting, important shortcuts, etc to make life easier.

In excel the cells can be used to write text as well as do calculations, we will focus on calculation for which we need excel formula. Whenever one clicks on a cell and press 'equals' excel gives us a lot of suggestion of formula, here we have to pick one by typing in the formula. All these formulae whatever you use have a description that you can use to understand how to use it.

So, let's start EXCELing

1. SUM: This function can be used to sum a range or selection of cells.

As you can see in the argument of the function there are different number series which implies you can choose multiple ranges to be summed up together

SUM( range1, range2,.....rangeN)

For more variants of SUM function follow the tutorial 2: SUMIF, SUMIFS

2. COUNT: This function is used to give a count of elements in the selected range of cells.

As you can see above the definition of the count, the implementation is the same as of SUM.

COUNT( range1, range2,.....rangeN)

For more variants of COUNT function follow the tutorial 2: COUNTA, COUNTIF, COUNTIFS


3. AVERAGE: This function is used to output the average of the selected cells, given all the cells have numbers in them.

The implementation is the same as the above formulae.

AVERAGE( range1, range2,.....rangeN)

For more variants of AVERAGE function follow the tutorial 2:  AVERAGEA, AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS


4. PRODUCT: This function is used to output the multiplication or the product of the range of the cells selected.

The implementation is the same as the above formulae.

PRODUCT( range1, range2,.....rangeN)


So, We have discussed the basic formula to get you started with the basic mathematical functions.

Try this: 1. Try to design a calculator
                2. Think about how will you use SUM to implement SUBTRACTION (Answer in the comment section)