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you may already have some experience
creating simple formulas that have only
one type of operation but sometimes you
have to create more complex formulas
that do have more than one Operator for
example addition and multiplication to
do this you'll need to understand how
Excel is calculating the answer Excel
uses a set of rules called the order of
operations which you might remember from
math class the order of operations
determines which parts of the formula to
calculate first the very first thing
that you calculate are the items in
parentheses then if you have any
exponents you'll calculate those next is
multiplication and division and finally
addition and subtraction Excel knows to
use the order of operations whenever it
calculates a complex formula it's
important that you remember it so you
can create formulas that will give you
the correct answer
to remember the order you can just use
the acronym PEMDAS or to make it even
easier remember the phrase please excuse
my dear Aunt Sally let's go over each of
these in a little more detail in this
formula five plus two is in parentheses
so we'll calculate that first to get
seven and then we can just multiply
three times seven to get 21
this formula contains an exponent 3 ^ 2
we'll need to calculate that first and
then we can do the addition
if you have multiplication or division
that will come next here we multiply 2
times 4 to get 8 and 9 minus 8 equals 1
now multiplication and division are
considered to be on the same level that
means if you have both of them in your
formula they're calculated from left to
right
in this example we'll do the division
first and then the multiplication if we
wanted the multiplication to happen
first we could just put it in
parentheses or we could rearrange the
formula so the multiplication was on the
left finally we have addition and
subtraction just like multiplication and
division these are on the same level so
we'll calculate them from left to right
ok now let's put them all together this
formula may look really complicated but
we're just going to go step-by-step
through the order of operations and
you'll see that it's really not that bad
we'll start with the parentheses we'll
calculate each of these to get 2 and 3
and as you can see the formulas already
starting to look a bit simpler next
we'll look to see if there are any
exponents in this formula there is 1 2
to the 2nd power when we calculate it it
becomes 4 next we'll do the
multiplication and division going from
left to right and now all that's left is
addition and that gives us our answer
which is 8 point 7 5 and that's the same
answer Excel would give you if you
entered that formula in your worksheet
now I'm going to show you why it's so
important that you follow the order of
operations every time if you don't your
formulas won't give you the correct
answer in this example I'd like to add
these three values and find out how much
the sales tax will be I'll start by
typing the equal sign which is how you
always start a formula then I'll
calculate D 3 + d 4 + D 5
next I'll multiply by point zero seven
five which is the tax rate at seven
point five percent now this may look
like it's going to give us the correct
answer but it's not that's because we
didn't follow the order of operations
remember multiplication comes before
addition
so excel is going to multiply D five by
point zero seven five first then it will
add d3 and d4 which isn't what we want
we want these three values to be added
first so to do that we just need to put
them in parentheses parentheses are
often the best way of controlling which
parts of the formula are calculated
first and when this formula is
calculated we can see that the answer is
20 dollars and 56 cents so whenever
you're doing a complex formula just
remember to follow the order of
operations then you'll get the correct
answer every time