Mathematical Functions in Excel
What is an Excel function?
Up until now we've seen 3 types of elements used in Excel formulas, as shown in the formula below:
=A1+7
In this formula, A1 is a cell reference.
The '+' sign is an operator. We've already learned about the 4 basic operators (-,+,/ and *).
And 7 (which is obviously a number) is called a Constant. Constants can be numbers, strings(text), dates, times and monetary values.
So what is a mathematical function?
A mathematical function is a calculation that was preprogrammed into Excel.
For instance, if you need to calculate the square root of a number, you can use the SQRT function.
For example, the formula:
=SQRT(4)
Will return 2 as the value.
Excel includes hundreds of built-in functions that can be used in a multitude of ways. This function library is one of the features of Excel that makes it such an amazing tool. We'll discuss some of these functions later on.
But for now, let's go back to the SQRT function...
The SQRT function receives one parameter that can be either a constant (like 4,9,16,20) or a cell reference (like C4) and returns the square root of that number.
So the formula:
=SQRT(A1) will return the square root of the value contained in A1
The example below shows the use of SQRT formula for an entire column:
If we use a non-numeric value as the parameter of the SQRT function, it will return #VALUE!, which indicates that an error occurred while trying to calculate the function.
It is also important to remember that functions can be used as a part of a formula. For instance the formula...
=1+SQRT(A1)/2
Is totally valid as shown below:
