All language subtitles for 2Topic 1-1 Formulas and Functions in Excel Week 3 Manipulating -1

now before we move on with more functions

and more calculations in Excel

let's take a moment to pause and make sure we really

understand what's going on with functions

because the whole point here is

I want you to be able to move on and try new functions

and be able to figure out

how to use those in the future

so let's talk about functions in general

now here is what we just did in Excel

I'm going to be showing you in the formula bar

what we've done

and then we'll recreate some of this

and we'll talk about a little bit differently

in this case

when I talk about the function some

this word right here

that is the name of the function

and you can see

Excel is giving us some information here

it's telling us what it's expecting to see

in the parentheses

these are called arguments

and so we have the function at the beginning

after the equal sign

remember we always need the equal sign

then we have the function

and then we have parentheses

in which we need to put information

those are the arguments

and so for a sum function

the arguments is a

are a series of numbers

that were asking Excel to add up for us

and as you saw

we can provide those numbers as a range

or we can just type them in manual

or we can just write in a whole

long sequence of numbers

and as long as it's between those parentheses

Excel will sum those up for us

I'm gonna start over here and retype this in

because I want you to pay

attention to what Excel is doing here

Excel is starting to autofill

once we hit the equal sign

it's guessing

starting to predict what function we might want

when we get that function

in this case some

you can see it gives us some really nice information

adds all the numbers in a range of cells

great now we know what some does

we start to enter the arguments

we enter the open parenthesis sign

and now it's telling us what we need to put into

the parentheses

what arguments it needs

what information it needs

to be able to complete this function

and Excel is saying

I need a series of numbers

and so we've taken care of that already

where this becomes really critical is when we figure

out that there are hundreds of functions in Excel

they're all slightly different

and some have very

very specific uses

let's look at count

for example

I'm gonna clear this out

and we'll do count again

count counts

the number of cells in a range that contain numbers

what this is telling us is that count

can only work on numbers

it can only count up the number of observations

if those observations are numbers

if we try to do count on months

I'm going to move over here

and we'll do the same thing count

and we try to count up how many months we have

what do you think is gonna happen

0 we don't have any counts there

because count can only count numbers

because count can only count numbers

now that doesn't seem useful right

because a lot of time

we do wanna know how many months we have

well this is that idea of specificity

that I was just talking about

so there's a different function here

we'll go ahead and clear this out again

we'll go ahead and clear this out again

we're going to start a new function

and look at this

right below count

there's a different function

count a counts the number of cells in the range

that are not empty

numbers or text

and boom that worked

because as we see up here

we used the count a function focusing on count

look at how there are several others

count if blank

count if count ifs

we're actually gonna use a few of these

we're gonna use some of the if functions as well

so that you can explore how those work

but the key here is recognizing this pattern

so to summarize

we always start with an equal sign with a function

then we put in the function name

once we start typing that in

Excel gives us information about that function

then we start with the parentheses

and that's when Excel gives us hints

in terms of what kinds of information it's looking for

in those arguments

all functions require arguments

and that's what goes in the parentheses

so now that we have this more general

understanding of how functions and Excel work

understanding of how functions and Excel work

we can move on

we can move on