Excel Formulas are probably the most difficult aspect of spreadsheets to learn.
Personally I think the apprehension stems from the term, formula. "Could you please write a formula".
It sounds difficult. In spreadshet lingo addition is a formula, division, multiplication, all formulas; and these basic mathamatical processes are pretty familiar to everyone.
I encourage anyone learning Excel, or spreadsheets in general, to write at least a couple simple formulas just to play, and to learn.
On paper we may write 150 + 150 + 150 = 450. Spreadsheet addition would look like A4 + A5 + A6 = A7; whatever is in cell A4 will be added to A5, and likewise for A6. With long hand math, and more complicated numbers, you would have to perform the operation every time one value changed.
The beauty of spreasheets is the value of a cell, say A4, can change, all you have to enter is the new A4 value, the resulting sum will be produced faster than you can get your eyes across the screen.
Therin lies the value, While creating a spreadsheet may seem time consuming, it's value is in it's existence. Once you have taken your idea, or your need, to track your information, and converted it to a cell format, all that is left is to enter data and attain your results.
For an example, the Autosum formula in cell G2 above looks like this: =SUM(B2:E2)
To create our own formula we could simply divide by four to get an average: =SUM(B2:E2)/4, as shown above.
Or times by three to get a projection: =SUM(B2:E2)*3
From these examples you can gather the symbol / represents division, while * is multiplication.
As is the case in math, operations within the parenthesis are performed first.
A point to remember when searching for the correct formula to apply, they are named by the result of the operation; to apply addition, you would use the SUM function, to perform multiplication, you would use PRODUCT.
I hope you found this information helpful, and I hope my Basic Excel Formulas video will help tie it together.
