Top 12 BASIC Excel Formulas Everyone Should Know (with Real Examples)

Everyone should learn basic Excel formulas for great opportunities. As you all know, Microsoft Excel is the most used and powerful application in the world, which helps you to organize, analyze, and visualize your data efficiently. You can use it in education, companies, finance, government offices, and even daily life too. Excel has some basic formulas, which are simple, powerful expressions. Along with this, you can calculate, analyze, clean, and manipulate data. If you are a student, you can maintain your expenses, or if you work in a company as a manager, you can give a performance summary to your manager. With simple basic Excel formulas, you can easily do it and save your hours.

Manual errors can be prevented, and you can get control over your data. In this article, I will show you how basic Excel formulas work through real examples and also tell you why and when you should use them. If you have just started working in Excel, then you should learn the basic Excel formulas. Learning some basic Excel formulas can greatly increase your confidence and ability to work. Here we are using some simple examples to understand the most commonly used Excel formulas, which are not only easy to use but also essential for everyday spreadsheet tasks.

Why you should learn excel formulas?

• Saves time:  You can automatically solve repetitive calculations instead of solving them manually.
• Reduces errors:  You can eliminate human errors in an accurate manner.
• Gives control:  You can understand the data better and create your own reports.
• Improves productivity:  The work that would take you hours to do by hand, you can do it in minutes.
• Career advantage:  If you improve your Excel skills, you can get more job opportunities.

SUM formula calculates the total sales.

1. SUM Function

Formula: =SUM(F3:F12)
Purpose:  Adds all numeric values from cell F3 to F12.

Explanation:  We have a list of sales made by different executives. SUM formula calculates the total sales.

Result: 29652 – Total of all numbers between F3 and F12.

Pro Tip: You can also use AutoSum shortcut key Alt + = to automatically insert the SUM formula.

Calculates the average Sales.

2. AVERAGE Function

Formula: =AVERAGE(F3:F12)
Purpose:  Calculates the average of the selected range.

Explanation:  It adds all the figures given in the range and divides them by the number of given values.

There are 10 values, and their sum is 29652. So 29652 / 10 = 2965.2

Result: 2965.2

Find the maximum sales.

3. MAX Function

Formula:  =MAX(F3:F12)
Purpose:  Finds maximum value in selected range.

Result: 4665 — this is the maximum sales value among the sales executives.

Find the minimum sales.

4. MIN Function

Formula: =MIN(F3:F12)
Purpose:  Finds the smallest value in the selected range.

Result: 1300 — this is the minimum sales value.

Converts text to uppercase.

5. UPPER Function

Formula: =UPPER(G3)
Purpose: Change case lower to upper.

Example: january becomes JANUARY

Scroll downward to relate the excel formulas to the all column.

Converts text to lowercase.

6. LOWER Function

Formula: =LOWER(G3)
Purpose: Change case upper to lower.

Example: JANUARY becomes january.

Converts text to propercase.

7. PROPER Function

Formula: =PROPER(G3)
Purpose: Capitalizes the first letter of each word.

Example: january becomes January, february becomes February

Count only numeric values.

8. COUNT Function

Formula: =COUNT(F3:F11)
Purpose: Counts the number of numeric values only.

Result: 5

Note: Text and blank cells are ignored. Dates and times are also counted because Excel treats them as numbers.

Count text and numbers.

9. COUNTA Function

Formula: =COUNTA(F3:F11)
Purpose: Counts all non-empty cells, including text, numbers, dates, time etc.

Result: 7

Counts only empty cells.

10. COUNTBLANK Function

Formula: =COUNTBLANK(F3:F11)
Purpose: Counts only empty cells in the selected range.

Result: 2

Explanation:

Formula	Purpose	Example	Result
SUM	Total of numbers	=SUM(F3:F12)	29652
AVERAGE	Mean of numbers	=AVERAGE(F3:F12)	2965.2
MAX	Highest number	=MAX(F3:F12)	4665
MIN	Lowest number	=MIN(F3:F12)	1300
UPPER	Convert text to UPPERCASE	=UPPER(G3)	JANUARY
LOWER	Convert text to lowercase	=LOWER(G3)	january
PROPER	Capitalize first letter	=PROPER(G3)	January
COUNT	Count numbers only	=COUNT(F3:F11)	5
COUNTA	Count all filled cells	=COUNTA(F3:F11)	7
COUNTBLANK	Count only empty cells	=COUNTBLANK(F3:F11)	2

Count the Length of a Text String

11. LEN Function

Formula: =LEN(F2)

Purpose: Finds the number of characters in a cell. This includes letters, numbers, spaces, punctuation, special characters, and symbols etc.

Explanation:

Removes all extra spaces

12. TRIM Function

Formula: =TRIM(F1)

Purpose: This function removes all extra spaces from text, keeps only single spaces between words. Use for cleaning messy or imported text data

Example: Input Text – Learn    excel   beginner   to   advanced online

In the given example, you can see multiple irregular spaces between the words.

Output Text – Learn excel beginner to advanced online          

Final Thoughts

Learning these basic Excel formulas gives you a strong foundation for exploring more advanced functions. Practice these formulas on your own data and increase your Excel skill. Whether you are tracking sales, organizing data, or creating reports, these tools will save your hours and will make your tasks more accurate and efficient. These are small but powerful functions in Excel; if you learn them well and become familiar with them, you can use them in your daily reports and data cleaning tasks.

Pro Tip:

Copy-Paste as Values

After applying all excel formulas, always copy and paste values (Ctrl + Shift + V) if you need static results. Otherwise, they keep changing if the source cell changes.