Common functions

There are loads of built-in functions in Excel. A good first step is to learn how to write functions, which we have gone through in this chapter. You can start by learning SUM which is the most common function. After that you can expand your repertoire of functions as you run into new challenges and come across more functions.

Simple Excel functions can be divided into mathematical functions and text functions. In addition to these simple Excel functions, two other important groups of functions are logical functions and lookup and reference functions.

Common mathematical functions

Mathematical functions are used to perform calculations with numbers in Excel.

Common text functions

Text functions are used to work with text in Excel. The use of text functions can seem unclear the first time you see them. They are often used together to join parts of text in different cells (for example to put together a clearing number in one column with a hyphen and an account number in another) or to split a text into several parts (for example to find the space in a name and extract the text before the space as the first name in one cell and the text after the space as the last name in another cell).