In this video, we're going to learn how to create a formula. Now it is important to firstly define what exactly is a formula. formula is the word that we use for cell content that performs calculations. And we can tell Excel to create a formula. But starting with either the equal sign, or in fact the plus or minus, that is our indicator to Excel to actually perform some type of calculation. Here is a simple example of that.

Both of these cells look identical. This contains the actual number of 1000. However, as we will note over here, while the answer of the cell is 1000, look into the formula bar, or moving to edit mode in the cell. And you'll actually notice that the underlying cell content is a calculation. And we told Excel to perform this calculation by starting with the equals key and then we provided The actual numbers together with this mathematical operator, Excel then performs the calculation that presents the result. So quite simply, that is how we create a formula.

But as we've seen, we need to learn what are the different things that can go into a formula. We can have various different operators. So for example, multiplication, division, or any of these other ones that you notice on the side. Some of the more obscure ones will include the episodes on which actually joins different pieces of text together, as well as all of these logical operators, which we'll get to in future videos. And since we are talking about all of these different operators, it's important to also note the order in which x will perform these operations. So he has a good example a formula which contains several different operator It will be performed in a particular order.

And I'm going to use the evaluate formula to to identify how Excel performs these different calculations. Moving to formulas and evaluate formula. The underlined part indicates which part of the formula is being calculated first. So as we can see, there are no brackets within our calculation. So the first calculation being done is exponents, we can click evaluate. Next is the multiplication and then only subtraction and addition.

And that gives us our answer of negative 200. However, if we place brackets within the calculation, whereas previously, the exponents with the first calculations performed now we noticed that the brackets are the first calculation Now in addition to the different operators, a formula has to also contain different inputs. And these inputs can be simple numbers like we've seen before. hard coded values back five multiplied by nine. They can also be cell references, either individual cells or ranges. For example, we've pointed over here to cell A 38, which contains the number 45.

Excel looks into cell A 38, extracts that number of 45 and multiply that by five. We can also use Excel functions, which we're going to learn in a future video. As you can see over here, this formula which starts with equals then contains this sum function, which performs addition of all of these numbers. We can even include text within a formula. For example, If you want it to tap out that the total units sold is and make reference to this number in a dynamic way, we can actually include that in a formula. As you can see, the important principle over here is that text is contained within double quotes, if we change any one of these numbers, but this number, and this formula, which as we've seen is referencing that particular cell change.

And finally, we can also use what are called named ranges. You can see over here that this is simply a formula that says equals total units sold. And the reason why we can do this is because I've got a named this cell in the Name box with the name of total units sold. And that means we can use that within our formulas and functions in the future. So to summarize, we've spoken about the concept of a formula being the situation With cell content performs actual calculations, and we've learned about the different operators, the order of those operations and the inputs that we can use within a formula. We'll see in the next video