Formulas

To enter text or number information into the spreadsheet, just move the cursor to the required cell, type the text or number in the formula bar and press the enter key. In most spreadsheets you will want to do some calculations with this text and number information. This is done using formulas. Formulas are entered into cells using an equal sign followed by the expression to be evaluated. The result of the calculation will be displayed in the cell that contains the formula. Examples:

=2+2 | Will display the value 4.
="Hello " & "world!" | Will display Hello world!.
=SUM(A1:A10) | Will add up the values in cells A1 to A10 and display the total.

Note that although you will usually see function names (like SUM above) in upper case, you can enter them in upper or lower case. The same applies to cell names, you could enter A1 or a1 to refer to the top left cell.

Many formulas, like SUM, allow you to specify not just one cell but a whole block of cells as a parameter. This is done by specifying the name of the cell at one corner of the block, followed by a colon, followed by the name of the cell at the opposite corner. For example the 2x2 square of cells in the top left corner of a worksheet could be specified by A1:B2 (or A2:B1, or B1:A2 etc, it doesn't matter which corner is specified first).

To refer to cells on other sheets, prefix the cell or range reference with the sheet name followed by an exclamation mark, for example Sheet1!A1 or Sheet1!A1:B2. If the sheet name contains spaces, you will need to put it in single quotes, like this: 'Other sheet'!A1.

Some formulas, such as =MMULT(A1:B2,C1:D2) (which multiplies two matrices together), can return more than one value. These are called Array formulas. To use these, you will first need to select a block of cells of the correct size and shape for the expected results, then type your formula into the formula bar, and enter it not by pressing the Enter key, but by holding down the Shift and Control keys and then pressing the Enter key. This tells the program that this is an Array formula.