Microsoft Excel Basics – Creating Sums in Excel

Creating sums in excel is not that hard after all. I know most people see Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and automatically think they are difficult. As you will see in this tutorial, making sums in Excel is just a matter of knowing the formulas. Once you learn the Microsoft Excel basics it is easy to learn the more difficult features and use Microsoft Excel to your advantage. I believe that everyone can find the use for this fantastic software. Even the stay at home mum can make a family budget in Excel as the uses for this program are endless. You will most likely need to know how to create a basic spreadsheet and then can move onto to this tutorial with that background knowledge.

How to Use Sums in Excel to Create a Formula?

To use sums in Microsoft Excel, we first need to know the address of each cell. If you look at the screen shot below I have two arrows pointing to a particular cell. This shows you the address of that cell in Excel. As you can see it is D4. Therefore the cell to the right on the same row would be E4. Once you understand this we can now look at Excel Sums.

Microsoft Excel Basics – Sums in Excel

Remember this is a Microsoft Excel basics tutorial so I am going to focus on the four main ingredients to make sums in excel. As you can see I have listed the Excel sums that I would like to explain.
- = minus
* = multiply
/ = division
+ = plus

Microsoft Excel Basics – Sums in Excel

This tutorial is equal to learning one plus one. In the screenshot below I have a table that I have made and it shows the sum I created to add up totals for me automatically. As you can see I have used =N3-K3. This means that the K3 cell will be subtracted from the N3 cell. If I wanted to add the cells together I would have =N3+K3. If I wanted to divide I would have =N3/K3.

To find the total of two cells:

1.  Click on the empty cell where you want the answer to appear. This is the total of the two cells that we are going to add together.
2.  Put = in the cell.

3.  Then click on the cell that is first in the Excel sum.

4.  Now type in your minus, plus,divided by, or times, sign.
5.  Now click on the second cell that goes into this sum.
In the screen shot above I clicked on O3, then typed the = sign, clicked on N3, then typed the – sign, then clicked on K3.

Once you have made your tables and sums in Excel you can now use that data to create a graph.

You will see this for yourself in the video below.

Watch this Microsoft Excel basics video about sums in Excel

To sum up an entire column.
Simply type this to add up an entire column =SUM(K3:K6)
The sum will range from K3 to K6 and add up K3,K4,K5,K6.