Office 2013 In Depth

Choosing the Right Function

Excel functions provide you with ready-made formulas for just about any type of calculation you want to undertake. Statistical, Financial, and Math & Trig are all examples of function categories that supply functions that do calculations. Statistical functions, such as COUNT and AVERAGE, are designed for doing statistical analysis. Financial functions, such as PMT and FV, compute the monthly payment on a car or house or the return on an investment, respectively. Math & Trig functions, such as SINE and COS, return the sine or cosine of an angle, respectively (sorry for dredging up any potential trigonometry nightmares).

There are also functions that do not actually do what we typically think of as calculations, meaning ...