Saturday, October 16, 2004

Using the Excel Status bar for Quick Calculations

There is a cool feature in Excel on the status bar. Select any two or more cells that have values in them.
Now look down on the status bar just below the horizontal scroll bar. You should see the words "Sum=55" and the value will be the sum of the cells you selected.

This is a neat way of quickly checking the total of a group of cells. Non-adjacent cells can be selected using the CTRL key while clicking on cells.

Now right click the words "Sum=55" and a list of options will appear. These are None, Average, Count, Count Nums, Max, Min and Sum. Select any of these and that function will be performed on the selected cells and the result displayed in the status bar.

Note that the difference between Count and Count Nums is that Count will display the total number of non empty cells selected, while Count Nums will only display the total of cells selected with a value in them.