Excel is still a very powerful tool in the era of advanced analytical software. Here is a list of some very easy and useful excel functions which come very handy to analyze/summarize any large data-set.

Count Functions:

• Count : Returns number of cells that contain numbers
• CountA : returns number of non-empty cells
• CountBlank : returns number of blank cells
• CountIf : returns number of cells given a specific criterion
• CountIfs : returns number of cells that meet multiple criteria

Sum Functions:

• Sum – returns sum of the values for the selected cells
• SumIf – returns sum of cells given a specific criterion
• SumIfs – returns sum of cells that meet multiple criteria
• SumProduct – multiplies corresponding cells in two or more ranges and returns sum of those products

Average Functions:

• Average – returns average of the values in the selected cells
• AverageIf – returns average of the values in the cells specified by a given criterion
• AverageIfs – returns average of the values in the cells specified by multiple criteria

Error Functions:

• IsError – checks whether a value is an error and returns ‘TRUE’ or ‘FALSE’ accordingly
• IfError – another way to identify errors in values

Logical Functions:

• If – a logical function which tests for presence of any condition and returns either a ‘TRUE’ or ‘False’ or any text string specified
• AND – a logical function to check if all arguments are true
• OR – a logical function to check if any of the specified arguments are true
• ISTEXT – checks whether a value in a cell is text or not
• ISNUMBER – checks whether a value in a cell is a number

TEXT Functions:

• TRIM – removes spaces from text string except for single spaces between words
• LEN – function counts characters
• MID – extracts characters from middle of text string given starting position and number of characters
• PROPER – function changes all capital letters or all lower case letters to all lower case except for first letter in each word
• SUBSTITUTE – function finds some text and replaces it with some different text
• REPLACE – function replaces part of text string with another text specified by the user,given starting number and number of characters
• FIND – it is case sensitive.FIND finds starting position in text string of text the user specified.Example find ‘y’ in ‘harry’ returns 5.
• LEFT – returns specified number of characters from text string from left
• RIGHT – returns specified number of characters from text string from right.

I will describe these functions with examples in detail in other posts.