Microsoft® Office 2008 for Mac Step by Step

Understand Functions

A function can be thought of as a service provided by Excel to do a specific task. That task might be to perform some math operation, it could be to make a decision based on information you give it, or it could be to perform an action on some text. A function is always indicated by the function name followed by a set of parentheses. For most functions, arguments inside the parentheses either tell the function what to do or indicate the values that the function is to work with. An argument can be a value that you type, a cell reference, a range reference, a name, or even another function. The number and type of arguments vary depending on which function you’re using. It is important to understand the syntax of common functions ...