Excel formulas basics tutorial - Part 1 - How to build basic formulas in Excel 2016, 2013, 2010,2007

in this video we're going to talk about how to do basic math formulas in Microsoft Excel math and formulas is a very important part of micro Microsoft Excel so you want to make sure that you have this mastered so let's take a look at rule number one rule number one all formulas start with an equal sign so I'm going to go ahead and click on a blank cell and I'll type in the equal sign and I'll type in 34 Plus 98. so if we take a quick a closer look at that the formula says equals 34 Plus 98. I'm going to go ahead and hit the enter key now you can see how the the result of the formula shows up in the actual cell and the formula shows up in the formula bar over here as we can see let's try a subtraction so I'll type in equals 98 minus 43. again we'll take a closer look and it says equals 98 minus 43. notice how I always start with the equal sign and there's not going to be any spaces in your formulas in most cases when I hit the enter key it's going to do the math for me so rule number one all formulas start with an equal sign now let's take a look at rule number two after you type in the equal sign you can either type in the number you want or you can click on the cell on the spreadsheet that contains the number so let's try that out I'm going to try to add those two numbers together so I'll say equals 132 Plus 55. and that'll certainly work when I hit the enter key you can see it's going to do the math for me and of course when I click on that cell the formula is up here in the formula bar but here's a better way I'm going to type in the equal sign and instead of typing in the number 132 I'm going to click on the cell that contains the 132 right there which happens to be cell C2 and I'll type in the plus sign and then I'll click on this cell that contains the 55 which happens to be cell C3 so now the formula says equals C2 plus C3 which means use the numbers in those cells when I hit the enter key I'm still going to get the 187 but here's the difference that formula is pointing to those cells so if those cells change the formula will be calculate so in other words I'm going to come over here and I'll type in 63. now when I do that this number right there is going to stay constant because those numbers are hard-coded this number down here should recalculate and you can see that it did now it says 195. so we calculated because it's pointing to cell C2 and C3 when C3 or C2 changed then the formula also recalculate so take a look at rule number two after you type in the equal sign you can either type in the number that you want or you can click in the cell on the spreadsheet that contains that number that actually is the better way when you click on the cell so that when the cell changes it'll recalculate so let's take a look at rule number three you're going to tie things together with mathematical operators and the formula will follow the mathematical order now I put I put these in the mathematical order over here so let's see some examples of some of these expressions sometimes you might use parentheses and I'm going to show you a good example of the parentheses in just a second if we look over here it says equals open parentheses 4 plus 5 close parentheses times six so because of the parentheses it'll do that plus sign first so it'll do 4 plus 5 equals 9 times 6 is going to give you 54 and you can see the result will be 54. now sometimes you might have to use an exponent an exponent is going to be this little up arrow and you get that by doing a shift of 6 on your keyboard so it might say something like equals to up Arrow four I believe that's called a carrot and then you can see it took 2 to the fourth power so perhaps you might have to do exponents and you use that little carrot the way you get that is by doing a shift six on your keyboard multiplication is going to be the asterisk so in this case I have equals 7 asterisk 8 which means seven times eight and you can see that's going to give us to 56. division is going to be the slash now this is the slash this one the question mark uh key of your keyboard so in this case it says equals 99 11 and you can see the real result is going to be 9. here obviously the plus sign is going to be for addition here's an example like that and obviously the subtraction will be the minus sign and here's an example of that now let's see what happens when we have more than one mathematical operator in the expression so I'm going to say equals 4 plus 5 times 6. now you see it's going to follow the mathematical order which I have listed over here so it's actually going to the multiplication first 5 times 6 is 30 and then come back and add the 4. as you can see it's going to give me 34. let's take a closer look at that formula I'm going to go up to the formula bar over here equals 5 plus 6. so because of the mathematical order it did the multiplication first and then it came back and added to four and that's what we got the 34. now the way I can control that is I can use to parentheses so now I'm going to double click on that cell to change that cell you can either change the cell up here on the formula bar or another way to change the cell is to double click on it so I'll double click right there and now I'm going to put an open parenthesis before the 4 and I'll put a closed parenthesis after the five now because of the parentheses it's going to force the addition to go first and now we have a different result now we have the 54. so your math your math is going to file the mathematical order and the way you can control it is you put parentheses around the part that has to go first and of course it can get much much more complicated than that but it's basically going to follow the mathematical order if you um if you put something in parentheses then that part of the formula that's going to go first if you have more than one set of parentheses then it'll take the parentheses from left to right however sometimes there's parentheses inside of other parentheses and if there's parentheses inside of other parentheses then it'll take the inner ones first and then work its way out and then going across it'll still do the parentheses left to right all right so let's put all that together all formulas will always start with an equal sign then after you type in the equal sign you can either type in the number that you want or you can click on the cell on the spreadsheet that contains the number that you want and you're going to tie things together with your mathematical operators and it'll follow the mathematical order now when I learned this a long time ago and maybe you learned this uh this way as well they gave you a way to remember the mathematical order if you look in column I I wrote down the first letter of each of those words P for parentheses e for exponents M forward multiplication D for division a for addition and S for subtraction so they gave you a mnemonic phrase to help you remember the mathematical order maybe this rings a bell for you please excuse my dear and Sally notice how it starts with those same letters in column I which are the same letters that these words in column F start with so it's just a mnemonic device please excuse my dear Aunt Sally so what possibly can and Sally have to do with Excel well it's going to help you remember the mathematical order okay so when you have a longer mathematical expression it's going to follow the mathematical order which I have listed right here and also the way you can control it is you're going to put parentheses around the part that you want to go first like in this example over here in cell G3 so you might want to print the screen out and um you know have this by your side as you're starting to build your formula so let's try another example in this case I'll say equals seven plus nine times eight divided by three minus 6. now what's going to happen here the way it is now it's going to do the multiplication first then it'll do the division then it'll do the plus and then it'll do the minus so I don't know what the answer is going to be all right so it says 25. so let's take a look at that formula I'm going to double click on that cell again so let's break it down 9 times 8 we're going to get 72 divided by 3 right and then sorry I forgot to do math out so then we'll do this uh that's going to be 24. plus the 7 is going to be 31 minus the 6 and now I can see how it got to be the 25. and I now that makes sense to me now I'm going to double click on that formula again what if I wanted the plus to happen first there now this is going to make a much bigger number I'm sure so I'm going to go ahead and do the parentheses around the 7 and the close parentheses F to the 9. now I'm sure it's going to do a much bigger number because it's going to do 7 plus 9 which is 16 times the 8. yeah see now I got to be 36 instead of being 25. so those parentheses really do make a difference let's take a look at that and in this case it actually did the addition first because of the parentheses so we got 16 times 8 divided by 3 minus 6 and therefore it became a much bigger number as we can see so the parentheses are going to make a difference everybody now in this case what if I wanted the what if I want the subtraction to happen next then we'll put the parentheses over here around the 3 and around the 6. then it's actually going to do the addition first then it'll do the subtraction then it'll do the multiplication and then it'll do the division and you can see now we have even a different number all right so hopefully you got some ideas of how to work with your formulas but just about every formula will follow this this algorithm where you always start with the equal sign after you type in the equal sign then you can either type in the number that you want or you can click on the cell in the spreadsheet that uh contains the number that you want and then things can be tied together with your mathematical operators now um percent 100 in other videos but here's some quick ways to do percents I'm going to type in 400 there and I would like to get 10 of that number well there's two quick ways I can do that I'll say equals 0.1 0.1 is going to be equal to 10 percent then I'll say times or the asterisk and I'll click on that 400 which is really cell E10 and we get to number 40. so one thing that you could do is you can say equals 0.1 times E10 and that means 10 percent and when I hit the enter key I get the number 40 there another way to do 10 is just to use the percent sign so he also equals 10 percent times the 400 so take a closer look at that formula analysis equals 10 percent times E10 and that's also going to give me the number 40 as we can see now if I change that number right there then you can see I'll change it to 900. and that changes both of those numbers so I'll see you in the next episode and we'll start to go further with our mathematical formulas here in Microsoft Excel