Welcome to Excelling with Excel

Adding in Excel

The thing to remember - when Excel sees an equal (=) sign in the formula bar, it tells Excel let's go to work. Do you remember where the formula bar is? It is the blank or white area after the = sign.

The next thing to remember - the basic operators:

1. + means to add
2. - means to subtract
3. * means to multiply
4. / means to divide

Let's practice:

• you are going to add 4+3 to get 7 and you will use the autosum icon
• type the number 4 in cell A2, the number 3 in cell B2
• click on cell C2 (this is where you want the answer to appear) and click on the autosum icon (see the diagram below or check out the icons by holding the mouse pointer over the icon bar - the autosum icon is usually found between the fx and the world icons
• after you select the autosum icon, dotted lines appear around the cells Excel thinks you want to add
• look at the formula bar - you will see =Sum(A2:B2) meaning Excel wants to add the numbers or data in the range of the cells A2 through B2
• tap enter and magically the answer of 7 appears in cell C2

More Practice

• enter the following into cells E2:E5 by doing this: in cell E2 type 5 tab enter, 6 tab enter, 7 tab enter, 8
• check it out - is the data in cells E2:E5
• click cell E6 and then autosum
• look at the formula bar and look at the dotted lines around the cells Excel thinks you want to add
• tab enter and the answer appears!

Moving on again to more formulas