Chapter 10: Introducing Formulas and Functions
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Function arguments ......................................................................................
In the preceding examples, you may have noticed that all the functions used parentheses. The
information inside the parentheses is the list of arguments.Functions vary in how they use arguments. Depending on what it has to do, a function may usel (^) No arguments
l One argument
l (^) A fixed number of arguments
l An indeterminate number of arguments
l (^) Optional arguments
An example of a function that doesn’t use an argument is the NOW function, which returns the cur-
rent date and time. Even if a function doesn’t use an argument, you must still provide a set of
empty parentheses, like this:
=NOW()
If a function uses more than one argument, you must separate each argument with a comma. The
examples at the beginning of the chapter used cell references for arguments. Excel is quite flexible
when it comes to function arguments, however. An argument can consist of a cell reference, literal
New Feature
Excel 2010 contains more than 50 new worksheet functions. n
But, before you get too excited, understand that nearly all the new functions are simply improved ver-
sions of existing statistical functions. For example, you’ll find five new functions that deal with the Chi
Square distribution: CHISQ.DIST, CHISQ.DIST.RT, CHISQ.INV, CHISQ.INV.RT, and CHISQ.
TEST. These are very specialized functions, and the average Excel user will have no need for them.
Excel 2010 offers only three new functions that might appeal to a more general audience:
l (^) AGGREGATE: A function that calculates sums, averages, and so on, with the ability to ignore
errors and/or hidden rows.
l (^) NETWORKDAYS.INTL: An international version of the NETWORKDAYS function, which returns
the number of workdays between two dates.
l (^) WORKDAY.INTL: An international version of the WORKDAY function, which returns a date
before or after a specified number of workdays.
Keep in mind that if you use any of these new functions, you can’t share your workbook with someone
who uses an earlier version of Excel.
New Functions in Excel 2010