EXCEL AUTOSUM FORMULA

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Lesson 19 - Excel AutoSum Function/Formula

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EXCEL AUTOSUM FUNCTION/FORMULA

The Excel AutoSum simply makes using the SUM function even easier, but only under the right conditions. Basically what the AutoSum will do is sum a range that is visibly directly above or to the left of the cell that we use it in (the default is above). It will include all of the visible range until the first blank cell or the first cell containing text. Try these examples.

On a clean Worksheet put any numbers in the range D5:D10 and F5:J5.
Select cell D15 and click the AutoSum icon on the Standard toolbar. It's the icon on the right of the globe that looks like a reversed Z.

You should get the formula =SUM(D5:D14). Notice it Start s at cell D5. This is because D4 is the first blank cell. It includes the empty range D11:D14 because it assumes we will want to add numbers within this range at some stage.

Now try this;

Delete the AutoSum in cell D15 then scroll down until cell D10 is no longer visible. In other words row 11 should be our first visible row.
Select cell D12 and click the AutoSum icon
You should see: =SUM() in cell D12. Push Enter and you will get an error message.
Push Esc twice to cancel the operation.

The reason the AutoSum did not work is because there were no visible cells containing numbers above or to the left.

Try a similar exercise on the numbers in cells F5:J5 and the same thing will happen. Although we could not enter the AutoSum in the second example, it did write the =SUM() formula for us and place the mouse insertion point between the opening and closing parenthesis. This means we could simply select any range that we wanted to sum.