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Better understanding excel formulas & its functions

shaikhrulez

Active Member
Hello everyone..!

I've been confronted with this problem for little while now, thought to share with you all. I've been using Excel for more than 5 years, before visiting this forum I used to think of myself an intermediate excel user with some good problem solving skills in excel... lol my over confidence :p

Don't know exactly where did I find this website, but indeed that was a fine lucky day for me that I actually arrived here. It has been around a month now, I found plethora of new excel functions & formula, many useful tips & discovered a very broad world of opportunities excel could offer. I must say my skills are improving with each passing day thanks to each n every forum member for all their generous help.

Now coming to the problem, although I'm accustomed to most of the excel features, formulas & functions but still I find it very difficult to understand excel formulas, they sometime looks scary to me o_O Mostly the formulas which combine multiple functions / criteria simply go over my head. Like combining text functions, with countif, sumif etc where to use array instead of normal formula? & where to apply VBA coding? I'm unable to grasp all this :(

I'm working hard but might be not in the right direction, I tried using Evaluate Formula option in excel but that too didn't help much. Senior members / Excel Ninjas I need your help, where should I learn the basics of formulas? where should I learn & grasp the formula syntax? what else I should do to become Awesome :awesome: in Excel?

Thanks.
 
Trial and error ;)

I find going through forums and solving problem posted by others an excellent way to learn. I started off by working out problems on my own and comparing it to what's posted. Then I started answering questions here.

I also tend to read few articles from different sites. There are many excellent ones out there. You've found one already.

Others that comes to mind are...
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/MainPage.aspx
http://www.contextures.com/
http://dailydoseofexcel.com/
http://excelxor.com/
 
Trial and error ;)

I find going through forums and solving problem posted by others an excellent way to learn. I started off by working out problems on my own and comparing it to what's posted. Then I started answering questions here.

I also tend to read few articles from different sites. There are many excellent ones out there. You've found one already.

Others that comes to mind are...
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/MainPage.aspx
http://www.contextures.com/
http://dailydoseofexcel.com/
http://excelxor.com/

Thanks a bunch @Chihiro for your valuable insight. I often try solving problems posted here, perhaps due to lack of basics yet I'm unable to respond effectively.

Do you recommend any book to refer alongside these online material? Currently I got Excel Bible by John Walkenbach, but I'm unable to go through it regularly because of time constraints.
 
Personally, I've never used books. I tend to go to web sites with examples to download. Then I start playing around in them, changing parameters, values, range etc. One of best learning experience was dissecting someone else's workbook and recreating from scratch (through trial and error).

Other thing I do often is to dissect complex formula into component parts, breaking each intermediate step into helper columns to see what it evaluates to. Not necessarily useful for array formulas though. I find F9/evaluate formula more useful in those instances.
 
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