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functions are a great time-saving option
for calculating data in your worksheet
they can be used in place of formulas
when a formula would be too long or just
too complicated to write out manually to
access the function library go to the
formulas tab on the ribbon here you'll
find hundreds of functions to choose
from
they've all been organized into
categories to make them easier to find
for example under financial you'll find
functions that deal with things like
interest and monthly payments under text
you can perform text manipulations like
converting lowercase to uppercase
replacing text and more date and time
includes functions that return the
current date time day of the week and
other useful data some of the most
common functions are pretty simple
though like sum and average you can
access these using the drop down arrow
under Auto sum in this example I'd like
to add these ten cells to calculate the
total if I tried to create a formula for
that I'd have to add each cell
individually not only would that be
tedious it would also make the formula
really long especially if I had say a
hundred cells that I wanted to add so
instead of creating a formula I'm going
to use a function first select the cell
where you want the answer to appear then
choose a function in our case we'll open
the autosum menu and then choose sum now
Excel has inserted the function and also
selected the cells that are being added
together if it selects the wrong cells
you can always change that by dragging
the corner handles here
when you're done press ENTER on your
keyboard and the answer will appear
let's look at this function in a little
more detail just like formulas functions
always start with an equal sign but you
may have noticed that there are no
mathematical operators such as addition
or subtraction like you would normally
see in a formula instead functions use 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 are
numbers to use when calculating the
result in this example we only have one
argument even though there are two
different cell references this is called
a range of cells or a cell range a cell
range is represented by two different
cell references with a colon in between
in this case the range consists of all
the cells between d3 and d12 if you want
to use more than one argument you'll
need to separate each one with a comma
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 what I'd like
to know is how many business days it
took for each item to be delivered first
select the cell where you want the
function to go then choose a function if
you know what category it's in if you
don't you can try searching for it
instead just click the insert function
command on the far left of the ribbon
searching for functions can be tricky
but for more experienced users this can
be an extremely useful tool just type a
description of the function you're
looking for I'm looking for something
that'll count the number of days that
have you elapsed so I'll type count days
and then press Enter
we've gotten a lot of different results
here to learn more about a function just
click the name and a description will
appear below the function called Network
days returns the number of workdays
between two dates and that's exactly
what we want so I'm just going to click
OK and another dialog box will appear
there will be separate fields for each
argument in the function this function
has up to 3 arguments start date end
date and holidays when you click a field
you'll see a description of it below and
if you need more help you can click the
link that says help on this function for
the start date I'm going to select cell
e3 and for the end date I'll select f3
we know the holidays argument is
optional because it's not in bold so I'm
going to leave that one blank before you
continue you can check the result of the
function here when you're ready click OK
and the function will be added to the
worksheet just like with formulas you
can copy the function using the fill
handle here and now we can see the
number of business days it took for each
item to be delivered if you've never
used functions before the syntax may
seem a little strange at first but with
some practice you're bound to get the
hang of it and soon you'll be using your
favorite functions over and over