In this video, we're going to learn how to edit an existing formula. If you use a lot of formulas in your work, you will often find that you'll need to edit them over time, perhaps you've made an error, or just need to change the different references within the formula. And we can have a look at two methods using the mouse and then using the keyboard. To go into what's called edit mode of a formula, you could simply double click on the cell. Do you notice that instead of then showing the calculated result, we actually get the view of the formula within the cell and we get to see the different references with great color coding. If this didn't work for you, you might have the following option switched on.

I'm gonna move to excellent options using the keyboard keystroke of Alt F t. Moving to advanced if this option over here for allow editing directly in cells is switched off, then you will no longer be able to double click to edit the cell. Instead, double clicking actually moves to the cells which are referenced in the formula. But I personally like to have that switched on. So I'm going to turn it back on allowing editing directly in cells. Once again, double clicking on the cell goes into what's called Edit Mode. Once in edit mode, if you need to, for example, change any of these references, did you know that you can actually use your mouse to click and drag these references around and as you can see, as we are doing this, so the cell address is actually changing in the formula.

In addition to that, we could also expand or decrease the range. So this is sometimes a very useful method of changing cell references instead of retyping. using the keyboard is a bit easier Since all we need to do is select the cell that we'd like to edit, and simply press f2. f2 also moves into edit mode, we can use our keyboard directional keys to change the active position of the cursor, and we can delete or just make different selections within the spreadsheet. The change that I would like to make in this example, is to create an absolute reference for cell B six. Since I can see that that reference is moving, it should stay absolutely fixed on cell B six.

So I'm going to move to the original formula, press f2. To go into edit mode, make sure my cursor is flashing somewhere next to or within cell B six, and then simply hit the f4 key. I'm going to press Enter. And now use the fill handle to copy this formula across and down, and although we initially had the incorrect formula topped out, we have successfully edited that formula replacing those with correct answers throughout. So in summary, we can double click on the cell, or simply hit the f2 key to go into edit mode. We'll see in the next video