Excel Adding Formula

In this section, we'll discuss formulas some more. Because formulas are at the heart of spreadsheets. The reason you're using a spreadsheet is to work out some sort of mathematical calculation, whether that be a family budget calculation or a company profit calculation. And you can't do those calculations without using formulas.

Adding Up

You've seen how to add up in Excel. You either used individual cells to add up, like this:

= A1 + A2 + A3 + A4

Or you have used a range of cells with the Sum function. Like this:

= Sum(A1:A4)

Either way you get the same answer. But you can combine the two to add up. For example, if you wanted to add up cells A1 to A4 and cell A10, you'd do it like this:

= Sum(A1:A4) + A10

You can also use the Sum function alone. Like this:

= Sum(A1:A4, A10)

Here we have entered a range of cells in the brackets - A1:A4. But after that, we added a comma then the final cell we wanted to add up. If we also wanted to add cells A12 and A14 to our sum, we just add a comma then the cell reference. Like this:

= Sum(A1:A4, A10, A12, A14)