126 PCWorld APRIL 2020HERE’S HOW EXCEL FUNCTIONS AND TOOLS
left-justified and numbers are right-justified
but, because everyone formats their
spreadsheets for aesthetics now, that
method is unreliable. Another option is to
scroll quickly through a long list of imported
numbers and watch the Formula Bar. If you
see apostrophes before any of the numbers,
those entries are text. Last, look for the green
triangle in the top left corner of the cell.
Unless the previous owner of the
spreadsheet instructed Excel to ignore thiserror, then the contents of
the cell are text.
If the values are text,
you must convert them to
numbers immediately. To
do this, move down to the
first number in the list that’s
actually text. Highlight the
range of text that’s
impersonating numbers.
Right-click the yellow
warning sign that’s left of
the first text cell in the
range. Click Convert to
Number from the pop-up
list, and it’s done.- MIN/MAX
FUNCTIONS
Use the MIN function to
find the smallest number in
a range of values, and the
MAX function to find the
highest. The syntax for these functions are:
=MIN(range); =MAX(range) where range
equals the list of numbers you’re calculating.
Common uses of this function are; for
example, find the highest/lowest grade in a
classroom; the highest/lowest sales dollars
in a store; the highest/lowest batting
averages of your favorite baseball team; and
so on.
Some would ask, why not just sort the
data? You could, but every time the numbers
COUNT & COUNTA count the number of cells that contain something.