Spreadsheet Formulas: Google Sheets and Excel

Functions are the engine inside the cells of your spreadsheet. They power all your most important operations.

Whether you’re calculating compound interest, concatenating cells, or projecting financial expectations, you’ll need to use formulas in Google Sheets and Excel.

Here, we’ll talk about how they work. Our team of experts includes data analysts, programmers, and financial wonks.

Use our search function to look for any specific formula you want to explore, or read on for some of the most popular Google Sheets formulas we’ve ever covered.

Popular Formulas in Google Sheets

We already mentioned a few powerful built-in formulas. The most common might be using a spreadsheet to calculate compound interest.

The same formulas also allow financial planners to project potential investment growth for retirement investments.

We use similar spreadsheet formulas for linear regression, which is helpful for predicting all sorts of financial situations.

Of course, many formulas are so ubiquitous they can’t be confined to a single category. You might need to concatenate cells for all sorts of imported data.

Understanding Syntax

We cover the syntax of Google Sheets and Excel functions in every one of our articles. That means we’ll break down any formula with an equals sign.

In our article on the IF CONTAINS formula, you’ll see this:

=REGEXMATCH(text, expression)

Then, we break down what that means. The first term is the name of the function. The terms in parenthesis are arguments for the formula.

Those vary based on the Google Sheets function, so we give examples for exactly what you need.

Spreadsheet Formula Examples

We also include step-by-step instructions on how to use each formula. That’s true for Google Sheets and Excel functions.

Read my guide to ISERROR, for example. I give a complete guide on how to use it to highlight rows with errors. The guide also includes instructions on how to modify the formula to check for errors in multiple rows or across your whole spreadsheet.

Spreadsheet Formula Cheat Sheet

Looking for quick answers in a single PDF? We wrote a popular Google Sheets Formulas Cheat Sheet. You can download it for free.