Sigourney Jackson
Unit-5 Discussion Board
Introduction to Computer Lab
March 14, 2013
Did not know there are so many functions for excel, some of the most useful tools in excel let you perform a variety of tasks automatically within a spreadsheet. They return different result depending on certain circumstance such as whether a particular condition is true or false.
Excel includes a number of these functions that you can use to not only to make working with spreadsheets faster, but also to help ensure your accuracy. These functions let you code the decision-making process inside your worksheets rather than relying on the person who enters the data to make the choice and enter the result.
For example, to see how a decision-making function can work, consider a situation where you charge a flat fee for shipping up to certain value of invoice and percentage of the invoice value above that. Instead of manually checking to see whether a flat fee or percentage value is appropriate and then entering the amount into a cell, you can have excel do the work for you.
There are a number of Excel formulas that work in a similar way by allowing you to create one function to handle multiple situations. This is the IF function that I’m referring to, let's suppose we have a situation where the cost of shipping a product is $4.95 for any amount of product up to and including $20.00 in value and then 25 percent of the invoice price over that amount. The function looks like this: =IF (G15<=20, 4.95, G15*0.25). The syntax of the function reads: =IF (test, calculation or value if true, calculation or value if false)

References
http://www.smallbusinesscomputting.com