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Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you the basics of using Formulas and Functions
in Numbers.
I'm using Numbers version 3.0. We're going to look at some of the basics of using functions
and formulas. So I'm just going to open up the simplest blank template and it is going
to give me a single spreadsheet with a single table in it.
You can put values in these cells. So let's say put 2 and 7 in here. The basic idea of
a formula is you can perform operations like, for instance, adding these two together.
In order to start a formula instead of typing in a number, if say I wanted to type the number
twenty in here I would type 20. But instead I'm going to hit the equals key on my keyboard
which tells Numbers that I want to enter a formula. You can see it comes up with a special
interface there for entering a formula.
Now I can type in the names of the cells if I want to. I could say B2 and then I could
hit a plus symbol for adding two together and then C2. You can see when I hit return
it is going to give me the result. If I hover over this one you can see at the bottom here
I've got the formula B2+C2.
An easier way to do this, let me delete that, is I start typing equals and then I actually
click rather than type B2. So I click on B2 and then I hit + and I click on C2, hit return,
and I get the same result. I don't even have to type it in and figure out the name of the
individual cells.
Now I can get really complex with these formulas. Let me delete that one here and put in another
number and another number. Then in here I could use parentheses and say this plus this
and then I could close the parentheses and add this and say divided by this. You can
see I've created a pretty complex formula there and I get the answer.
The cool thing about formulas is they update automatically. So if I change this 2 to a
3 you could see this changed. I change the six to an eight and you can see it also changed.
It is always going to be the result of this. If I change these values then the results
of this will change and it will automatically update to reflect that.
So that is using simple math. But you can go further than simple math. Let's delete
this here and let'*** equals again but instead of using basic things like plus and multiply
we will go and click on the Function thing up here and we get several different functions.
Let's say let's do minimum. The minimum function is going to take a range of values. So to
give it a range of values I can just select the range like that. You can see it fills
it in with B2:E2 telling me it is this range. When I hit return I can see it gives me the
answer of 3, three being the minimum value here. If I were to change this to say 13 the
answer is four because now this is the minimum value. So you can see how I used this minimum
function to perform an operation on this stuff so I didn't have to just use math I can also
use functions.
Now you may have also noticed when I double clicked in here I brought up this function
browser on the right. This gives me a list of all the functions available in Numbers.
There are a ton of them. So many they have to break them up into categories. So, for
instance, I can look statistical functions. I can look at functions that deal with logic.
I can look at functions that deal with numbers. So for instance if I wanted to figure out
the square root or something like that I've got it all in here.
I can easily search for the function as well. So if I wanted to see all the functions that
have to do with average I start typing average and I can see there is a bunch of different
ones.
If I want to find out what any of these means and an example how to use them I simply select
it from the list and I can look down here below and I can see a description of it and
some examples of how to use that function.
Now a lot of formulas take a range of values. For instance sum. I can do equals sum and
I can take a range like that, B2 to E2. I can also say get the sum of an entire column.
So just click on the top here and you can see I just put C there and it shows me exactly
what it is going to do. It is going to do the sum of that. There is only one number
in there but if I were to add another one you can see it automatically updates. Likewise
you could do the sum of a row like that. It will work just the same. It will show you
what it is going to take the sum of. Notice Header and Footer cells are not included when
you want to use the range of an entire row or column.
One more thing you should know about formulas is that they can copy and paste really well.
So let's say I have a second row of numbers. I create a formula here which is going to
be the sum of these. So you can see this is the sum of B2 to E2. If I were to copy this,
let me select the cell just once, copy it, paste it, I get the formula that is not the
sum of B2 to E2 but the sum of B3 to E3. It recognizes that I copied from F2 and I put
it into F3, I moved it down one. So it moved the numbers in the formula down by one. So
that it makes it very easy to copy and paste. As a matter of fact if I had a ton of random
numbers in here, like that, I could simply select it once and selected this range here
and pasted that same formula across all of these it is smart enough to know this one
should be B4-E4, B5-E5, etc., all the way down.