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Microsoft Excel is one of the most common spreadsheet applications available around the world. The functionality of excel ranges from basic mathematical calculations to almost anything you can dream of.

Before we start with the formulas let me explain a little on how excel generally operates. Excel is essentially made up of columns and rows. Each intersecting row and column makes a cell, which by combining the column letter and row number can create a unique cell name that can be used as a reference when creating formulas.

1. Manual Calculations

The most basic calculations, don't need a cell reference and can be used just like a basic calculator. When starting any sort of calculation or formula in Excel, you need to start off by adding an equal sign for example type in = 2+2 and a 4 appears. If you forget the equal sign, just 2+2 will appear, so it's important to include the equal sign.

You can use this method for all sorts of calculations, dividing, multiplying, subtracting and if you want to get a little more complicated you can use brackets to enclose particular sections of the formula you are creating.

2. Calculations Using Cell References

Now that you have a little understanding of the real basic stuff, let's get into the fun stuff. Rather then just typing in the numbers you want to calculate, you can select cells to represent the numbers in the calculation. Let's have another look at our first example.

- Type a 2 in cell A1 and A2
- In cell A3 add an equals sign
- Without clicking anywhere else, click on the cell A1, do you see a pulsing line around A1
- Your formula in cell A3 should now look like this =A1
- Add a plus and then click on the cell A2
- The formula in the cell A3 should now look like this =A1+A2
- A3 should now hopefully appear with the number 4

For future reference if your not sure how a formula was calculated, or what cells were used, double click on the cell with the formula included, in this case A3. The formula will appear in the cell, and you can change by either typing the cell references or by selecting the cell like we did in the above example. To make things even easier the cell references are color coded by having an assigned color which also borders the cell the reference refers to. This makes things real easy when you have big formulas.

3. Totals and the SUM formula

The above formula is great for adding up a few numbers at a time, but what about if you had a really long column of numbers, using the above method would take a long time to

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