Beginning Microsoft Excel 2010

Chapter 3. From Data Entry to Data Creation: Formula Basics and Beyond

Now that we've gotten this far, we need to remind ourselves of the obvious: Excel is all about doing something with the data once it's been nestled into its cells—analyzing it, presenting it, and synergizing something new from all those static numbers and text entries; and that reminder takes us to a new domain of have-to-knows—the world of formulas and functions. It's here, once you learn the fundamentals, that you begin to sense the nearly infinite potential of the application—starting of course with the how-tos for adding those rows and columns.

The very first thing you need to know about formulas is that by that term I'm referring to any expression you can write in a cell ...