Top-5 Basic Excel Formulas

Microsoft Excel is all-time favorite spreadsheet software that is used throughout the world. Its interface is easy to use and intuitive. Excel offers all sorts of functionalities and capabilities that can be used to manage, organize, and process different types of data. Various sorts of analyses can be performed on datasets to make charts and gain useful insights. Excel is used by large corporations as well as students and other individual users. Excel has advanced functionality as well as basic features. This article explains the basic formulas of Excel for anyone who wants to brush up on their skills.

Most Basic Formulas

Anyone who uses Excel for the first time probably begins by using SUM, PRODUCT, and AVERAGE formulas. They perform the basic calculation similar to a calculator. SUM adds and PRODUCT multiplies a selected range of cells. AVERAGE as obvious from its name calculates the average from a chosen set of cells. Other basic formulas include MIN, MAX, and COUNT. MIN is used to find minimum value from a range of cells. MAX is used to obtain maximum value from a range of cells. Similarly, in a numeric dataset, the count returns the number of cells that contain a numeral.

Conditional and Logical Formulas

IF conditionals are an important part of Excel. From the Syntax of IF statement: IF (cell1<cell2, “True”, “False”), it can be noticed that when the value in cell one is less than cell two the condition is satisfied and the output is “TRUE”. If the condition fails the formula outputs “FALSE”. AND is a logical formula, it checks for one or more conditions, if all are true then the formula outputs “TRUE” otherwise “FALSE”. OR is a similar formula but it returns “TRUE” even if only one condition is satisfied.

SUMIF and COUNTIF

These are the advanced version of SUM and COUNT formulas because they also have the properties of the IF formula. SUMIF perform addition only when a certain condition is met, whereas SUMIFS check for multiple conditions. Similarly, COUTIF does the counting only when a certain condition is satisfied while COUNTIFS checks for multiple conditions.

CONCATENATE, TRIM, and PROPER

Concatenate adds two strings of text that are placed in different cells. TRIM formula deletes the unnecessary spaces in a cell. PROPER allows the text in the cells to be formatted correctly with proper capitalization.

RANDOM

Random function RAND is an interesting formula of Excel. It can be used to generate a random number between 0 and 1. Another variant of this formula is RANDBETWEEN (1,10). It generates a random number between two specified numbers such as in the above formula, the generated number will be between 1 and 10.

There are other basic Excel formulas that come in handy in day to day tasks. Some of these formulas include: ENDOFTHEMONTH returns the last day of the month, EVEN and ODD formulas round a cell value to the nearest even or odd number, and TODAY shows the current date.

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