cell references are one of the most
important concepts in Google sheets and
there are two 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 they are
probably the one that you're going to
use the most often in this example I
want to know the amount of money spent
on food items and to do this I'll need
to multiply the values in these cells
I'll just enter my formula here start by
typing the equal sign and then the
formula will be B 4 times C 4 when
you're done press ENTER on your keyboard
now if I use the fill handle to copy
this formula to all of the cells you can
see that in each one the cell references
are actually going to be different so we
have b5 b6 b7 and so on that's because
these are relative references when we
enter the references in the original
formula what the spreadsheet actually
sees is just the location relative to
the cell that contains the formula so in
this case it's looking at the cells to
the left of our current location and
that happens to be cells b4 and c4 each
copy is also looking at the cells to the
left of the formula this technique is
really useful because it means we can
copy the formula as we did here and the
cell references will sort of move along
with it that doesn't mean the references
have to be in the same row like they are
in this example they could be anywhere
in the sheet it just means that when the
formula is copied to a different cell
the references will move along with the
formula
there may be times when you don't want
the cell reference to change in this
example we have a list of catering
expenses and we want to find the total
spent on each item so for the first one
we know we spent $44 and 85 cents but
what is the total including the tax rate
we can find the answer by multiplying
I'll type the equal sign then be four
times
C four times e to
then I'll use the fill handle to copy
the formula to the rest of these cells
but wait a minute
that doesn't look right the first ones
correct because it's multiplying by e2
which is our tax rate but as we go down
the list we can see that the cell
reference is moving into these cells
which isn't what we want we wanted to
stay frozen on e 2 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 and the
row which will keep them from changing
no matter where you copy the formula to
you may also see mixed references that
only lock the row or the column when
copied although these are a bit less
common
we can go back to our example and add
dollar signs before the column and the
row to make e to an absolute reference
now if we copy the formula to the rest
of the list the error goes away and
we're left with the correct sales tax
the relative reference is different in
each cell but the e to reference our
absolute reference stays the same as you
can see the type of reference that you
use can have a big impact on your
formula so whenever you're creating one
just ask yourself do you want to use a
relative reference an absolute reference
or both
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