For the next week, I’ll be discussing common formulas and when to apply them focusing on the Sum feature. I chose this simple formula because the basics apply to most of the other common functions. If you simply want to see the end results of the formulas and learn how they work later, skip to the bottom.

Sum

Simple addition. The SUM formula takes a set or, as Excel prefers to say, “range of numbers,” and adds them together. It can’t get too complicated…right? If you’re using cells for each individual number, validating information for this formula is easy. If you’re manually typing the numbers in the formula within a singular cell, well, people make typos, and mistakes are harder to spot this way. SUM is one of the few formulas that ignores text in a range to create the final value, unless that text is in the same cell as a number.

Basics such as this are the foundation from which I’ll be building off for the next week.