Week 3 Tip

Formulas!!! This is what people mean when they ask if you are proficient in Excel. There are tons of these. Basically how they work is you choose a blank cell and most of the time the formula will require you to click a cell, column or a row. They almost always start with an equal sign.

The one I am going to show if you how to extra certain numbers and put them in a new column. 

In this example we want the last 4 digits of the account number is a seperate column. 

Find a cell to the right. Type   =right(CLICK ON CELL OR COLUMN YOU ARE PULLING INFORMATION FROM, HOW MANY DIGITS YOU WANT) If you want to put the new column before the column youre extracting information change it to =left

This works well if you want to keep past card info on file but dont actually want to keep the card info on file. So you can say last time I ran the card ending in 3456. Or if you assign account numbers to your clientel.  This is a very simple formula to show you how formula works. Whenever I type these I always feel like Im a programmer. There are a lot of these for every function you can think of. The nice thing about formulas is that you can assign them to one cell or a full row or column. To check the formula (so you can find out other peoples secret formulas they use and take them) you click on a cell and check the top formula bar. 

Knowing formulas is crucial to learning excel. They start to make sense after a while. I am glad I am learning about this now so when I start to track my expenses via excel I know I can search for formulas that will help me with my specific situation.