Learn Excel Formulas and Functions

Excel offers over 300 functions and formulas to help you get more out of your spreadsheets. This page contains a summary of the functions that are covered by lessons on this site. It's being added to all the time, so check back often!

VLOOKUP allows you to look for a specified value in a column of data inside a table, and then fetch a value from another column in the same row. An example might be where you need to find the sales for a specific salesperson from within a monthly sales report. In this lesson you'll learn how to use VLOOKUP in your spreadsheets by walking you through several simple examples. The lesson will also highlight some shortcomings of VLOOKUP, plus a solution to those shortcomings.

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 Excel offers a couple of handy functions that you can use to calculate the smallest and largest values in a range of cells. They are simple functions that go by the names of MIN() and MAX(). This lesson shows you how to use them. It also introduces SMALL() and LARGE(), functions which duplicate what MIN and MAX do, plus more besides. 

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 Excel offers a couple of handy functions that you can use to calculate the smallest and largest values in a range of cells. They are simple functions that go by the names of MIN() and MAX(). This lesson shows you how to use them. It also introduces SMALL() and LARGE(), functions which duplicate what MIN and MAX do, plus more besides. 

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This lesson shows you now to extract text from a cell in Excel. This is useful when you have a cell containing combining numbers and text, such as a part number, or several text values separated by commas. It introduces the RIGHT() and LEFT() functions, which are essential text manipulation functions in Excel.

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The SUMPRODUCT function allows you to multiply two arrays of numbers together (e.g. Quantity Sold and Price Per Unit) and add the results each individual calculation together. Without the SUMPRODUCT function, you'll find yourself having to create a third column in which you multiply the Quantity by Price for each row, and then find the sum of all the individual formulas. This lesson shows you how to use SUMPRODUCT to do all that with just one formula.

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This lesson introduces the LEN() function, which allows you to calculate the number of characters in a cell. This formula is useful on its own, or can be combined with other text functions such as RIGHT(), LEFT(), MID() and FIND().

The SUMPRODUCT function allows you to multiply two arrays of numbers together (e.g. Quantity Sold and Price Per Unit) and add the results each individual calculation together. Without the SUMPRODUCT function, you'll find yourself having to create a third column in which you multiply the Quantity by Price for each row, and then find the sum of all the individual formulas. This lesson shows you how to use SUMPRODUCT to do all that with just one formula.

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Sometimes you'll find yourself working with dates in an Excel spreadsheet that have been pasted or imported into Excel from another datasource. When that happens, Excel can treat those dates as text - in other words, they look like dates but don't behave like dates. For example you can't sort by date properly. This lesson looks at several ways you can convert a date which Excel is treating as text into a proper date value in Excel.

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The IF statement is a simple function in Excel that is one of the building blocks you need when you are working with large spreadsheets. You may not know you need it yet, but once you know how to use it, you won't want to live without it.

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Sometimes you'll find yourself working with dates in an Excel spreadsheet that have been pasted or imported into Excel from another datasource. When that happens, Excel can treat those dates as text - in other words, they look like dates but don't behave like dates. For example you can't sort by date properly. This lesson looks at several ways you can convert a date which Excel is treating as text into a proper date value in Excel.

96 comments

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