Excel has a really powerful and
convenient feature called functions a
function is a predefined formula and
it's used when a formula would be too
complicated or just too long you can
access them from the formulas tab there
are hundreds of functions that you can
choose from and they're organized by
category in the function library for
example the financial category contains
functions that deal with things like
interest and monthly payments
the text category allows you to convert
text to lowercase or uppercase replace
text and do other types of text
manipulation date and time includes
functions that return the current date
time day of the week and others and
there are many more functions
much of the time though you'll just need
to use common functions such as sum and
average and you can access these by
clicking the autosum drop down arrow
in this example I'd like to add all of
these cells if I try to create a formula
for this I would have to add each one
individually and that would get pretty
long and if I had to add hundreds of
cells then it would really not be
manageable at all so I'm just going to
add them by using a function
click on the cell where you want the
function to be and then click on the
autosum drop down arrow and select some
now this has inserted the function and
it's also selected the cells that are
being added if it selects the wrong
cells then we can always change that by
dragging these corner handles
but this looks right so I'll press ENTER
to get the result
let's look at this function and a little
bit more detail
just like formulas functions always
start with the equals sign but you might
notice that there are no mathematical
operators such as addition or
subtraction like you would normally see
in a formula instead functions have a
specific syntax that includes the name
of the function followed by one or more
arguments in parentheses the arguments
tell the function which cells or numbers
to use to calculate the result in this
example we actually only have one
argument even though there are two
different cell references this is called
a range of cells a range of cells is
indicated by two cell references
separated by a colon in this case the
range consists of all the cells from f6
to f-14
if you want to use more than one
argument you'll need to separate them
with commas
let's try a different function now in
this example we have a column for the
date that each item was ordered and the
date that it was received and I'd like
to know how many business days it took
to receive the item after it was ordered
first select the cell where you want the
function to go and if you know which
category your function is in you can
select it from there or you can just
search for the function by clicking the
insert function command
just type in a description of what
you're looking for I'm looking for a
function that can count the number of
days elapsed so I'll type count days
and press enter
lot of different results here you can
click on a function and read a
description of it below
Network day's returns the number of
workdays between two dates and that's
what we want so I'll click OK
there will be a field for each argument
and this function has up to three
arguments the start date end date and
holidays
when you click in each field you can see
a description of it below
and if you need more help on a
particular function you can click help
on this function
I'll select g6 for the start date
h6 for the end date and the holidays
argument is optional so I'll just leave
it blank
you'll be able to see the result here
click okay and the function will be
added to the worksheet
just like with formulas we can drag the
fill handle to copy it
and now we can see how long it took each
of these items to arrive
if you've never used functions before
the syntax may seem a little strange at
first but with some practice you'll
start to get the hang of it and over
time you'll probably find your favorite
functions that you'll use over and over
again like what you just saw radix add a
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