Mastering Excel Functions: A Beginner's Guide to 30 Essential Formulas
New to Excel functions? This hands-on guide teaches you 30 essential formulas from scratch — no prior experience needed. Learn at your own pace with interactive examples you can try right in your browser.
This guide covers the following Excel functions, organized from foundational to advanced:
Math: SUM, AVERAGE, MAX, MIN, COUNT — the building blocks of spreadsheet calculations for totaling, averaging, and counting data.
Text: CONCATENATE, LEFT, RIGHT, LEN, PROPER — join, extract, measure, and clean text strings from any data source.
Logic: IF, COUNTIF, SUMIF, AND, OR — make decisions, count conditionally, and sum based on criteria.
Dates: TODAY, WORKDAY, NETWORKDAYS, YEAR, MONTH — work with dates, calculate deadlines, and extract date components. See also: DATE function.
Lookup: VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, CHOOSE — search tables, cross-reference data, and build dynamic lookups. Ready for the next level? Try XLOOKUP.
Cleaning: TRIM, UPPER, LOWER, VALUE, ROUND — standardize formatting, convert types, and round numbers.
Explore more Excel tutorials, references, and practice materials:
- All Excel Functions & Formulas — Complete reference for every Excel function with syntax and examples.
- What is an Excel Formula? — Understand the difference between formulas and functions, and how to build your own.
- What is a Function in Excel? — Learn the anatomy of a function: name, arguments, and return values.
- Understanding Function Arguments — Deep dive into required vs optional parameters.
- Absolute vs Relative References — Master the $ sign in cell references — essential for copying formulas.
- XLOOKUP vs VLOOKUP vs INDEX/MATCH — Compare the three lookup approaches and learn when to use each.
- Excel Errors Troubleshooting Guide — Fix #N/A, #VALUE!, #REF!, #DIV/0! and other common formula errors.
- Excel Keyboard Shortcuts — Speed up your workflow with essential shortcut keys.
- Practice Data Downloads — Free sample datasets to practice your Excel skills on real-world data.
- Excel for Absolute Beginners — New to Excel? Start here with a tour of the interface.