Conditional statements

IF function basics Conditional statements, conditional expressions, conditional processing, IF-THEN, or IF-THEN-ELSE are all names for a programming concept where conditions are tested and actions are performed if conditions are met. If a certain condition is met, something is calculated. If that certain condition is not met, either nothing happens or something else is calculated. In Excel, when conditions are met, something is TRUE. When conditions are not met, something is FALSE. TRUE and FALSE are logical values. You will

Date and Time in Excel

How are date and time stored and formatted? No matter how date and/or time are formatted and possibly edited, the underlying values saved in cells are still decimal numbers. Given that Excel’s era starts on January 1, 1900, if we enter number 1 in the cell and format it as a date, the date we will see is in fact January 1, 1900.Zero will provide for a nonexistent date of January 0, 1900, and a negative number will result in

Numbers in Excel

How are numbers stored, formattedĀ and calculated? When dealing with numbers in Excel, we should be aware of a few things: numbers in Excel can be formatted in many ways: plain numbers, currency, percentage, date, etc. no matter how they are formatted and possibly edited, underlying values saved in cells are still decimal numbers those decimal numbers that Excel uses and calculates with go up to 15 decimal places (and even with that, there are caveats) this is not changed even

Text in Excel

Text-related features Excel may have a reputation for crunching numbers, but text-formatted data such as names, addresses, and descriptions is often encountered. Excel is also often used for processing data from a wide variety of unrelated databases, applications, and web sites. With those, issues such as numbers formatted as text, text formatted as numbers, multiple text fields combined into a single cell, and broken tables are not uncommon. Further complicating things, Excel functions designed to manipulate text-formatted data are many,

Spreadsheet basics

Starting with spreadsheets Spreadsheets are used to store and manipulate data. That data is stored in cells and organized in tables (i.e., rows and columns). Table cells can contain a value (text or number) or a formula. Formulas calculate new values, usually by referencing existing values. Both values and formulas can be easily modified.   These simple concepts can then be used to perform basic tasks, i.e., you can use your spreadsheet as a tape calculator. On the other hand,