"Excel 2010 Formula - Types of Formulas and Guide to Create Formulas"

Excel 2010 Formula - An Introduction

The Excel 2010 Formulas is fantastic! It can do things for us like add numbers, calculate the number of hours worked, lookup a product price, create a label for a report, or tell us whether two accounts are in balance and so on.

Those are things that formulas can do but let's get more specific about what makes a formula and look at the following topics in this article: 1) Different types of formulas. 2) Guide to creating formulas. 3) Formula elements (What can go into a formula?).

5 Types of Excel 2010 Formulas

In general, there are five types of formulas that we can create:
1) Calculating formulas that calculate a number answer (like adding).
2) Lookup formulas that lookup an item in a table (like looking up a tax rate or customer phone number).
3) Text formulas that deliver a word to a cell or create labels for reports (like an Income Statement label).
4) Logical Formulas that give you a logical value, either TRUE or FALSE, like formulas that say whether or not two accounts are in balance.
5) Array formulas are advanced formulas that can deliver more than one item (different from non-array formulas that deliver a single item).

Guidelines for Creating Formulas in Excel 2010

When creating formulas you must follow these guidelines:

1) Most of the time you put formulas in cells. But you can also build a formula in the Name Manager - New Name dialog box or the Conditional Formatting dialog box (we'll see examples later).
2) You must enter an equal sign as the first character in the cell (or dialog box) in order to signal to Excel that what you are creating is a formula and not a number or word.
3) If you have a space before the equal sign, the formula will not calculate.
4) If a cell is pre-formatted with the Text Number format, the formula will not calculate.
5) Formulas deliver a single item to a cell (or dialog box) such as a number, word or logical value.

Excel 2010 Formula Elements (What can go into a formula?)

Here is a list of the different sorts of things that we can put into formulas:

1) Equal sign (starts all formulas).
2) Cell references (also: Defined Names, sheet references, workbook references).
3) Math operators (plus, subtract, multiply, etc.).
4) Numbers (If the number will not change, like 12 months, 24 hours).
5) Built-in Functions (AVERAGE, SUM, COUNTIF, DOLLAR, PMT, etc.)
6) Comparative operators (=, >, >=, <, <=, <>)
7) The join symbol, ampersand, "&" (Shift + 7)
8) Text that is in quotes (example: "For The Month Ended")
9) Arrays constant (example: {1,2,3})

Related Topics:

4 Reasons Why Mastering Your Excel 2010 Functions Are So Critical!

Knowing the different types of Function Argument in Microsoft Excel

Excel Absolute Cell Reference (Example Demonstration - Part 1)

Excel Absolute Cell Reference (Example Demonstration - Part 2)

Excel Relative Cell Reference with Real-live Example Demonstration

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