Excel Basic Formulas — Free Excel Tutorial

Learn Excel Basic Formulas in Excel with a free, beginner-friendly tutorial, examples and practice for Indian students on Syllab.in.

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TL;DR: Learn Excel Basic Formulas in Excel with a free, beginner-friendly tutorial, examples and practice for Indian students on Syllab.in.

Written & reviewed by the Syllab.in Academic Team (CBSE/NCERT subject experts) · Updated Aug 26, 2026

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Excel Basic Formulas in Excel

The most-used functions summarise a range of cells. SUM adds them, AVERAGE takes the mean, COUNT counts how many are numbers, COUNTA counts non-empty cells, MIN and MAX find the smallest and largest. A range is written with a colon: A2:A10 means "A2 through A10".

These functions ignore empty cells and text automatically, which is usually what you want. AVERAGE of a range with a blank cell divides by the number of actual numbers, not the total rows — an important detail when marks are missing.

You can combine them: `=MAX(A2:A10)-MIN(A2:A10)` gives the range (spread) of values, and `=SUM(A2:A10)/COUNT(A2:A10)` reproduces AVERAGE. Understanding that functions just take a range and return one value is the mental model for everything that follows.

Excel Basic Formulas — Syntax

=SUM(B2:B8)
=AVERAGE(B2:B8)
=MAX(B2:B8)
=COUNT(B2:B8)

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