Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Plain & Simple

Summing a Group of Cells without Using a Formula

Sometimes, such as when you’re entering data into a worksheet or you’re curious to find out the sum or average of the values in a few cells, it’s too much work to find a blank cell and write a formula to calculate the sum or average for the cells. Rather than make you create a separate formula, Excel counts the number of cells selected, calculates a running total and average for the currently selected cells, and displays the results on the status bar. Finding the sum, average, and count of the values in the selected cells are the most commonly used operations, so Excel calculates those values by default. You can choose from several other operations, however, or even tell Excel not to calculate ...