Excel has well over 400 formulas available, and here’s the thing, most people only ever use about 5 to 10% of them. That’s genuinely fine. You don’t need to know them ALL, you just need to know the right ones for what you actually do day to day.
The everyday starting point
Every formula starts with an equals sign, followed by whatever calculation you want Excel to do. SUM adds up a range in a second (=SUM(A1:A5)), and AVERAGE does exactly what it says on the tin. Neither is exciting, but between them they cover a huge chunk of the maths most spreadsheets actually need.
Once you’re past totals, the next one worth knowing is IF. It lets Excel make a decision for you, for example =IF(A1>100,”High”,”Low”) marks anything over 100 as High and everything else as Low. Add AND or OR into the mix and you can test more than one condition at once, which is super useful once you start building anything with real logic in it.
Joining text and changing case
CONCATENATE (or the shorter & symbol) joins text together, so =A1&” “&B1 combines a first and last name with a space between them. UPPER, LOWER and PROPER change the case of text, handy for tidying up messy data someone else has typed in.
Dates that do the work for you
TODAY() and NOW() return the current date and time, and they’re brilliant dropped inside other formulas to build a countdown to a deadline or flag something as overdue. DATEDIF calculates the difference between two dates, useful for anything from staff tenure to how many days are left on a project.
Looking things up
VLOOKUP searches for a value in one column and returns the matching value from another. XLOOKUP is the newer, more forgiving version, and honestly it’s even more ACE, so if you’ve got a modern version of Excel I’d start there instead.
Catching your own errors
IFERROR wraps around another formula and lets you decide what shows up instead of an ugly #DIV/0! or #REF! error, for example =IFERROR(A1/B1,”Error”). Small addition, much tidier spreadsheet.
Top Tip: keep your formulas as SIMPLE as you can and document anything unusual with a comment. Future you (or whoever inherits the file) will thank you.
The best way to get comfortable is to practise on real data you actually use. Pick two or three formulas from this list, try them on something you’re working on this week, and build from there. That’s genuinely how most people, myself included, ended up learning Excel properly.
