Now let's take a look at two very easy to use functions, the "sum" and the "average" functions.
What we want to do here is get the total for yearly salary and previous year's salary and down here
we want to get the average for each of these.
Now for the total, we can type in these "sum" function from scratch. Open the bracket, we need to give it
the range of cells that we want to sum, C5 to C12.
Close the bracket, Press enter or control+enter if you want to stay in the same cell.
In a previous lecture
we saw an alternate way of doing this and that was to use auto sum.
You can get to auto sum by going to the Home tab, selecting auto sum from here
and if you hover over it you see the shortcut key, Alt and the equal sign.
Now if you also click on this dropdown here you can see other functions that are included in here that
you can easily use. Since the shortcut key is the fastest way of getting this done.
Let's use that.
I'm going to highlight the area I want my results to be in first and then "Alt+=".
That's it.
I get my sum function in there and Excel smartly tries to figure out what the correct range is. In this
case it's C5 to C12 and right here it's D5 to D12. Now to calculate the average
of these, I can start off by typing in the average. I'm going to press the tab key to accept that first
argument there and then I'm gonna give it the range I want to get the average of. And Excel automatically
calculates the average of this range so you don't have to get the sum and then divide it by the count
of these, it does it all for you. I'm going to drag this to the right or I'm just going to highlight this
and use the shortcut key control+r to fill this to the right. If I click here I can see that the correct
range has been highlighted. Now what if I want to sum values from different tables. I don't have one
continuous range. So let's say here I have another table and I want to add these to that sum. So if
I use auto sum right here, Excel things I just want to sum these. I don't, I want it sum these ones and
sum these as well. And this is where you can use the argument separator and then I'm going to give
it this range of cells, right.
So it's summing these and these and the bracket is closed, press enter. Now for average it's the exact
same thing.
Type in average and again you can give it different ranges, close bracket, press enter. Now if you want to fill
this to the right I'm just going to highlight these, what was the shortcut key? control+r just go here
to double check. These are referencing the D column, these are referencing the D column as well. So that's
how easy it is to use the sum and the average functions.