Advance Spreadsheet Skills

LESSON: BASIC FORMULAS

LEVEL: BEGINNER

CONTENTS:
6 Basic Formulas
16 The Order of Operations
Using formulas is when beginning users often start to
understand Excel’s usefulness, power and efficiency.
The five operators in this presentation, used with Excel’s
formula syntax, will help accomplish many common
tasks.
This presentation shows you how to enter and edit
basic formulas in Excel using values, cell
references and/or other formulas as inputs.
By the end of this presentation you can:

 calculate in a cell using mathematical operators

 use values, cells and other formulas as formula inputs

 change the order of operations with parentheses

Let’s add up the two numbers here in the second row.
Formulas start with an equals (=) sign. This tells Excel to treat what
you type next as a formula, rather than values or text.
When you complete the entry, Excel displays the answer in the
cell. The formula bar shows the underlying calculation.
(If you leave out the equals sign, Excel just treats the entry as text
and doesn’t calculate it.)
What if you want to calculate using the values in other cells?
To refer to other cells’ values, type their addresses into the
formula.
The calculation updates automatically when the input cells
The other basic operators in Excel are minus (-), multiply (*),
Divide (/) and exponent (^).
Of course, you can extend a formula by adding additional inputs:
You can use combinations of values, cell references and other
formulas/functions as arguments for your calculation.
The Order of Operations
 Likemaths, where there is more than one operation, Excel
calculates using the natural order of arithmetic operations –
BODMAS.

 Operations are calculated in the below order:

 Brackets first, then:
 Orders (ie powers & roots)
 Division & Multiplication (going right-to-left)
 Addition & Subtraction (going left-to-
right)
The example demonstrates the order of operations:
2^2*3+5 = 4*3+5 = 12+5 = 17
Enter parentheses ( ) to manually change the order of operations.
i.e. 2^2*(3+5) = 2^2*8 = 4*8 = 32
You can enter multiple sets of parentheses for more changes:
i.e. 2^(2*(3+5)) = 2^(2*8) = 2^16 = 65536