MS-Excel - Functions and Formula Tutorials

Excel can manipulate your data by using formulas. Formulas can be as simple as adding two or more numbers together or as complicated as determining the calculation of a second-order differential equation.

By using an old Excel4 macro function called EVALUATE in a special way, you can easily evaluate text equations (an equation formatted as text and interpreted as such by Excel) as actual calculations.

To get a word count of any cell or range of cells, we'll use a combination of SUBSTITUTE and LEN function/formulas.

Although referencing data by name is convenient, it's sometimes more helpful to store a constant value or even a formula, especially if you've been creating custom functions in VBA.

Excel's automatic incrementing of cell references works well most of the time, but sometimes you might want to override how it works.

You've surely seen Excel spreadsheets that have alternating row colors. For instance, odd-numbered rows might be white, while even-numbered rows might be gray. Conditional formatting makes this easy.

Using this tutorial, you can spare yourself the trouble of removing them by hand.

Validation needs can vary depending on the context in which the validation is used. However, you can create a spreadsheet in which one validation list changes depending on what you select in another.

When working with multiple lists, you can force a list to change by using a combination of option buttons plus a ComboBox.

Data validation can make it far less likely that a user will accidentally enter incorrect data. Sometimes, however, you might need to make it easier to enter data that otherwise would be flagged as incorrect by conditional formatting or blocked completely