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Sometimes trying to write a formula can be a bit like traveling without a map.
How exactly do you take a problem from real life and turn it into something that Excel can solve?
What you might
not realize is that you already have the skills you need to get there.
With some planning, some basic math, and a little knowledge of how formulas work you can get a lot farther than you might think.
Say you're at work and your boss comes to you with a problem.
Apparently, there's an event coming up and 614 people have already RSVP'd.
Unfortunately the venue only seats
550. So how many folding chairs are we going to need to seat all the extra guests?
Like a lot of real-life problems, there's actually enough data here to turn this into a math problem.
You could even think of it as a word problem.
Remember doing those in school. So-and-so has 14 apples. She gives five of them away, you know the rest.
When it comes down to it all we have here is a simple subtraction
problem - one that you might even be able to solve in your head. Just
take the number of people coming,
subtract the number of seats at the venue, and that will give us our answer.
Now watch.
We're going to move the equal sign to the beginning and with this one tiny change, it's now in a format that Excel can understand.
For bonus points, you could even change the numbers to cell references, see how it works.
Let's take a look at the answer.
Looks like we're going to need 64 extra folding chairs. And because we used cell references, we can change the number of people attending and
the answer will update automatically.
Sometimes getting from problem to formula is easier than you thought it would be. Like you just saw.
Then there are times when you get stuck somewhere in the process, and you're not sure how to continue.
The important thing to remember is that you're still most of the way there, even if you're feeling unsure.
You just have to break the problem down into more manageable chunks.
Say, you're this guy
and you've been thinking a lot about your finances lately. You want to save up enough money to buy a brand-new, totally awesome
jet ski!
Here's the problem: the jet ski costs
$6,000, you're planning to raise the money over time by saving a hundred and ten dollars each month.
How many years will it take to save the full amount?
Even at a glance you can tell this problem is a little different from the last example. For one,
it's going to take more than a simple subtraction formula to figure it out.
Let's try breaking it down instead.
We are talking about how many years this is going to take.
Maybe we should figure out how much we can save in a year based on what we're setting aside each month.
The formula might look something like this:
monthly savings times the number of months in a year - a simple multiplication problem.
And the answer is...
Uh not too bad: one thousand three hundred and twenty dollars per year.
Now that we have this number
we're just one step away from solving the problem. All
we have to do is create a second formula that divides our goal by the amount that we'll be saving each year.
Before we continue, notice how we've really thought this through.
Instead of writing one big formula. We wrote two smaller formulas and that makes the problem much easier to handle.
Okay, it's the moment of truth.
Looks like it'll take about four and a half years to save enough money for the jet ski.
Man, that's a lot longer than I thought it would take. Maybe you can buy a used jet ski?
The truth is there's no formula for writing formulas.
But that's okay the journey from point A to point B is rarely as treacherous as it seems.
Sure there might be some issues along the way you might run into a problem that you're not sure how to solve,
but remember you already know more than you think you do. That's the key to solving real-life problems in Excel.