What is a spreadsheet formula?

0:00 So what is a spreadsheet formula ? I'm gonna answer that in this video. Very simply, you can add some text. Hi. Hello. You can even add some numbers inside of Google Sheets. And you can format these. You can format these in a number of different ways But using Google Sheets just to put in some text is using like 1% of your brain With formulas, we can create pretty much little computers or little calculations inside of a cell So if we have someone's name, like Mary here, and we have text here, hi We can access over 500 formulas by just hitting equal sign By hitting equals sign , we have a number of formulas. AI, base, caught, day, today

0:47 I think today or now are actually really cool. You can write the word today, put in a parentheses, end parentheses, hit Enter, and you have now calculating today's date, and that will change automatically all the time. I think that's one of the coolest formulas ever We can also combine text and reference other cells . So we can say equals, and we can click on another cell, and then we can use ampersand here to add a space, another ampersand, and select Mary, and now we have, "Hi, Mary." We've combined these two cells and a little bit of text between quotes to create something new. Can also do some pretty quick calculations .

1:33 Equal sign, reference this eighty-eight, and say plus five hundred. We get five eighty-eight. Copy and paste these formulas, and they're gonna automatically update. This is B5. I've copied and pasted it down here. It became B6, so from fifth row to sixth row. I think that's pretty cool too But we don't have to just add a single number . Again, we can add multiple cells together. So I take that 500, I delete it, and I select B6. So now we're adding B5 and B6 together, and not just plus. We have equals 393 minus whatever's in B5, and this cell will update if I change these numbers.

2:19 See, these are updating automatically. I think formulas are so cool, and it's like 20 to 30% of what's available in Google Sheets. So we have text and a really cool relationship of columns and rows. Now we have formulas that we can combine together And there are a lot of formulas. You can find them here Insert. They're also called functions . And you go down to function , and now we have a whole database inside of here, and you can look through all 500 of them if you want. Or you could go to bettersheets.co/formulas And here I've created an entire database of formulas. You can even see a random formula and see the videos alongside it.

3:04 So this is INT. I don't know what that is, right? Ah, let's go to a different one Gamma in just, oh my God, that's so weird. But here's some very common ones, VLOOKUP to look up sort of based on some text inside of a little table . SUMIF if you wanna only sum some parts of your content. COUNTIF if you only wanna count something that you have some criteria of. But you can learn more of these and learn more about these and see all of these videos that I have here for each of these formulas. Also, in the video itself, I'll link to all of the formulas there inside of that video, so you can see other formulas that work really well together And if you're wondering, how do I do something with formulas? You can see the Google Sheets formula generator I have created and use it.

3:51 You can just say, what do you wanna do? What's your range that you're looking to do it in? And it will generate a formula for you. Here's some examples. SUMIF , get average of numbers in column A You can just generate that formula right away. You can see it's just average. That's a simple one But here you can do, get the maximum numbers, but you can also combine formulas in really cool ways, almost an infinite number of ways. Again, I think using formulas is like a 10 to 20% of what Google Sheets is. I think the next step, another 20%, is combining formulas For example We can take this B5 plus B6, put it in parentheses, and do divide by three ninety-three and get really cool calculations , just some simple math, but also use multiple formulas. We can say what is the maximum of these cells , and then we're gonna divide it

4:37 by the minimum of these cells And that's 500 divided by 100, which is five. If that changes, if it becomes like 400 here, now this is changing. The m- minimum has changed to 393, not 400, right? That's pretty cool. I think you can combine formulas in really cool ways. One of my favorite is if is blank. So we're saying, is this blank, B5? And if it actually is blank, you wanna say, "Write a number ," comma, and we say, "If it's false, we'll have this divided by this number ." And so if I delete the text in B5, it says, "Write a number ." Can even point a little A little arrow there. Okay, let's do 77. Boom, we got an answer. Really cool, right? I think this if is blank just brings some absolute magic to

5:25 spreadsheets But go discover more. There's 500 formulas and an infinite amount of formula combinations. Check out the formula generator over at bettersheets.co that I made. Check out the formula directory to learn more about each and every formula you want to use, and go ahead and ask me questions You're watching Better Sheets here on YouTube. You have two options here for your next video. Before you go, comment down below if you have any question whatsoever, and I'll make future videos from those questions. But for right here, right now, one of these videos could be your next Google Sheet