User Manual

Excel Formulas: It All Adds Up!
Ever remember getting frustrated trying
to type Excel functions? If you are new
you probably don’t even know where to
begin. Well, never fear! You get a new
AutoComplete feature in all the equations
you will use, and now you have it in Excel
2007. When you type an equal sign fol-
lowed by any letter you get a drop-down list
of functions that start with that letter, and
as you type more letters the list narrows
down to finally what you need.
A few items AutoComplete offers are:
Excel 2007 functions: As you can see in Figure 1-8, when you type the “=s” you
can see a lot of equations from “SUM” (which is the total) to “SQRT” (which is
Square Root) and more.
User-defined functions: These are the special functions that you (yes, you
will create some of these later on), or someone else has created in your
workbook or macro code.
Defined names: These are user-defined (defined by you) nicknames for spe-
cific cell ranges (so if you had cells A1 to A30 on your monthly bill work-
sheet you could call them February Bills).
Figure 1-8
Notice these windows pop up as you begin
typing in the cell.
Helpful hints conveniently pop up.
AutoComplete shows many different equations
from SUM.
Part I — Learn IT!
10
There is a little hovering box that describes what
the function does (Figure 1-8). This frees up your
brain from having to remember all the names of
the functions you use, so you can have more idle
time in your brain to think about what other
cool things you could be doing.
Just for
you...
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