Microsoft Excel 2003: Functions

There are a number of formulas built into Excel, like Sum. These formulas are called Functions. Below the Menu Bar (see right) you will see a “sigma” ∑ with a small down triangle to the right of the sigma (see arrow on diagram to the right). Click on the down triangle. The drop down menu that you see on the right will appear. Move down to More Functions and click-on More Functions.

Two menu screens will now appear at the same time. An “Office Assistant” will appear (see image on left of next page) and you can ask it questions (the little assistant may be a paper clip or just about anything). The Insert Function menu screen will also appear (see image on right of next page). The two menu screens work together to assist you when you are using functions.





Let’s work with the Insert Function menu screen. Click-on the small down arrow to the right of Or select a category: (see arrow at left).

In the drop down menu that appears you can see that there are all kinds of formulas (functions) that come with Excel spreadsheet (e.g. statistical, mathematical, financial, etc.). Instead of having to go to math, financial, or statistical tables in a book, you can enter data from your spreadsheet into the formulas and receive answers.


This is a really great, timesaving feature. We’ll now show you how to use the Help features of Excel 2003 to work with and understand these functions.



Click-on All in the drop down menu.



Look at all the functions (formulas)! We’ll just go through how to use the addition formula (SUM) in this tutorial. If you need these formulas in the future, you’ll know they’re here.


Use the elevator bar on the right side of the Select a function menu screen to move down the list until you see SUM. Click-on SUM.



Then click-on OK.

Remember, you clicked-on Cell C9 – which was “empty” because you deleted the formula in that cell.


When you click-on OK, the Function Arguments menu screen (above) will appear. If you look at the top of the screen in the SUM area, you’ll see that Excel 2003 has “guessed” that you desire to add the numbers above cell C9 – where you clicked in your spreadsheet. Smart Excel! Notice that it indicates that cells C6:C8 will be added (sum cells C6 through C8 – the colon (:) means “through.” It also indicates the numbers in cells C6, C7 and C8 and give you the sum {300;50;150} = 500 (right arrow above).

But it’s a little unclear how Excel did this. The Help in Excel Functions is excellent. So, to see how this SUM equation works, we’ll go to Help. To do this, click-on Help on this function in the lower left corner of the screen (see lower left arrow above).



On the right side of your screen you will see a Microsoft Office Excel Help window appear (similar to the one above) that will show you how to use this SUM function (or any function).