Microsoft Office Excel 2003.ppt

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Tutorial 2 – Working With Formulas and Functions Use Excel’s functions You can easily calculate the sum of a large number of cells by using a function. A function is a predefined, or built-in, formula for a commonly used calculation. Each Excel function has a name and syntax. The syntax specifies the order in which you must enter the different parts of the function and the location in which you must insert commas, parentheses, and other punctuation Arguments are numbers, text, or cell references used by the function to calculate a value Some arguments are optional Work with the Insert Function button Excel supplies more than 350 functions organized into 10 categories: Database, Date and Time, Engineering, Financial, Information, Logical, Lookup, Math, Text and Data, and Statistical functions You can use the Insert Function button on the Formula bar to select from a list of functions. A series of dialog boxes will assist you in filling in the arguments of the function and this process also enforces the use of proper syntax. Math and Statistical functions Define functions, and functions within functions The SUM function is a very commonly used math function in Excel. A basic formula example to add up a small number of cells is =A1+A2+A3+A4, but that method would be cumbersome if there were 100 cells to add up. Use Excels SUM function to total the values in a range of cells like this: SUM(A1:A100). You can also use functions within functions. Consider the expression =ROUND(AVERAGE(A1:A100),1). This expression would first compute the average of all the values from cell A1 through A100 and then round that result to 1 digit to the right of the decimal point Copy and paste formulas and functions Copying and pasting a cell or range of cells is a simple, but highly effective means for quickly filling out a large worksheet. To copy and paste a cell or range: Select the cell or range to be copied and then click the Copy button on the standa