Essential Excel Formulas and Functions

Overcome your Excel formula phobias with this clear and easy to follow guide

Formulas and functions are at the core Microsoft Excel and learning to use them effectively is an essential step in becoming proficient in Excel. This course provides clear and easy-to-follow instructions on how to build formulas for analysis, projection and data cleansing.


The course starts by discussing all of the different components that can be used to create a formula. You will be given clear demonstrations of the use of relative, mixed and absolute references, the use of dollar signs and how to name cell ranges to add clarity to your formulas.
Naturally, Excel functions are discussed in depth and many examples of using functions to analyze your data, beginning with every day functions like SUM, AVERAGE, MIN and MAX.
We then examine the use of text functions to clean up data prior to creating reports; functions like TRIM, UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, LEFT, RIGHT, MID and CONCATENATE.
Next, we turn our attention to conditional functions like IF, IFERROR, AND and OR. These functions allow you to make the value displayed in a cell dependent on the results of logical tests.
We then see how conditional functions can be combined with mathematical functions; using COUNTIF and SUMIF to produce calculations which only include those cells which match certain criteria.


And, naturally, no discussion of Excel functions would be complete without lookup functions. We discuss the use of VLOOKUP and, also, how the INDEX and MATCH functions can be used to lookup up data whose format makes the use of VLOOKUP impossible.


When you have completed this course, you will feel more confident about creating your own Excel formulas and taking advantage of Excel's wide variety of powerful functions.


This course was last updated on 25th March 2017, with the addition of a new project: the creation of an invoicing model.