Popularly Used Excel Functions and their examples
10 Excel Functions every regular worker should know
Excel functions are predefined formulas that are designed for the purpose of data analysis, manipulation and visualization. These functions are already available in Excel.
To get detailed information about a function, click its name in the first column.
Here are list of 10 functions that commonly used in Excel
Function |
Description |
SUM function | Use this function to add the values in cells. |
IF function | Use this function to return one value if a condition is true and another value if it’s false. Here’s a video about using the IF function. |
VLOOKUP function | Use this function when you need to find things in a table or a range by row. For example, look up an employee’s last name by her employee number, or find her phone number by looking up her last name (just like a telephone book). Check out this video about using VLOOKUP. |
LOOKUP function | Use this function when you need to look in a single row or column and find a value from the same position in a second row or column. |
CHOOSE function | Use this function to select one of up to 254 values based on the index number. For example, if value1 through value7 are the days of the week, CHOOSE returns one of the days when a number between 1 and 7 is used as index_num. |
MATCH function | Use this function to search for an item in a range of cells, and then return the relative position of that item in the range. For example, if the range A1:A3 contains the values 5, 7, and 38, then the formula =MATCH(7,A1:A3,0) returns the number 2, because 7 is the second item in the range. |
DATE function | Use this function to return the sequential serial number that represents a particular date. This function is most useful in situations where the year, month, and day are supplied by formulas or cell references. For example, you might have a worksheet that contains dates in a format that Excel does not recognize, such as YYYYMMDD.
Use the DATEDIF function to calculate the number of days, months, or years between two dates. |
DAYS function | Use this function to return the number of days between two dates. |
INDEX function | Use this function to return a value or the reference to a value from within a table or range. |
FIND, FINDB functions | FIND and FINDB locate one text string within a second text string. They return the number of the starting position of the first text string from the first character of the second text string. |