Office 2007 Bible

Tips for Working with Formulas

In this section, I offer a few additional tips and pointers relevant to formulas.

Don’t hard-code values

When you create a formula, think twice before you use any specific value in the formula. For example, if your formula calculates sales tax (which is 6.5 percent), you may be tempted to enter a formula, such as the following:

+A1*.065

A better approach is to insert the sales tax rate in a cell—and use the cell reference. Or you can define the tax rate as a named constant, using the technique presented earlier in this chapter. Doing so makes modifying and maintaining your worksheet easier. For example, if the sales tax rate changed to 6.75 percent, you would have to modify every formula that used the old value. If you store the tax rate in a cell, however, you simply change that one cell—and Excel updates all the formulas.

Using the Formula bar as a calculator

If you simply need to perform a calculation, you can use the Formula bar as a calculator. For example, enter the following formula—but don’t press Enter:

=(145*1.05)/12

If you press Enter, Excel enters the formula into the cell. But because this formula always returns the same result, you may prefer to store the formula’s result rather than the formula itself. To do so, press F9—and watch the result appear in the Formula bar. Press Enter to store the result in the active cell. (This technique also works if the formula uses cell references or worksheet functions.)

Making an exact copy of ...