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cell references are one of the most
important concepts in Excel and there
are a couple of different types that you
need to know about relative references
and absolute references let's start with
relative relative references are the
default type of reference and they're
probably the type that you'll use most
often in this example I want to know the
amount of money spent on each item and
to do this I'll need to multiply the
price by the quantity I'll enter my
formula here start by typing the equals
sign and the formula will be d4 times e
for and then just press the Enter key
now if I use the fill handle to copy
this formula to all of these cells you
can see that in each one the cell
references are actually going to be
different so we have d7 d8
and so on and that's because these are
relative references in the original
formula when we enter the cell
references what Excel actually sees is
just the location relative to the cell
that contains the formula in this case
it's looking two cells to the left and
also one cell to the left and those just
happen to be d4 and e4 in this case
and each copy is also looking to sells
to the left and one sell to the left
now this is really useful because it
means we can easily copy the formula and
the cell references will sort of move
with the formula and that doesn't
necessarily mean that the references
have to be on the same row like they are
here they could be anywhere in this
sheet it just means that when the
formula is copied to a different cell
the references will move along with the
formula
now there are other times where you
don't want the cell reference to change
in this example we have different
varieties of roses and we want to find
the percent of the total sold for each
type so for red delight we know that we
sold 28 units but what percentage of the
total is that we can find the percentage
by dividing I'll type the equal sign
and c3 / c12
then I'll use the fill handle to copy
this formula to all of these cells
but wait a minute
doesn't look right at all
the first ones right because it's
dividing by c12 which is our total but
as we go down the list you can see that
the cell reference is moving into these
empty cells which is not what we want we
want it to stay frozen on c12 for all of
these formulas and to do that we'll need
to use an absolute reference
absolute references will have a dollar
sign placed before the column row or
both to keep them from changing if you
put dollar signs before the column and
the row then neither of them will change
no matter where you copy the formula to
if you just put the dollar sign before
the row then the row will not change but
the column will change if you copy the
formula to a different column and if you
just put the dollar sign before the
column then the column won't change but
the row can change now most of the time
you're just going to be using the first
one where there's a dollar sign before
the column and the row
so we can go back to this example and
add dollar signs before the column and
the row to make c12 an absolute
reference
and now if we copy this formula these
numbers look a lot better
if you double-click on some of them you
can see that the relative reference is
different in each one but the c12
reference stays constant
the type of cell references that you use
in your formulas are very important so
whenever you're creating a formula just
ask yourself whether you want to use
relative references absolute references
or both like that you just saw radix add
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