6 essential Excel formulas every beginner should learn first

Published Oct 26, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT A Computer Engineer turned tech-savvy. Sanya is part of the How to Geek team, and she covers Android, Samsung, Google, apps, and everyday technology, combining hands-on experience with thorough research. She helps readers understand technology without getting lost in technical jargon. I used to think Excel was just about putting data into rows and columns and doing a few calculations. But once you start using it regularly, you realize how much time you waste doing things manually that Excel can handle in seconds. Not every formula is useful in everyday life, but these six can save you a lot of time, even if you’re a beginner. Learn these, and you’ll feel much more comfortable using Excel. XLOOKUP Find what you need without searching every row manually Say you have a product sheet with product names in column A, prices in column B, and stock quantities in column C. Your manager asks you to check the price of a particular product, but the sheet has hundreds of entries. No need to scroll through the entire list, you can use XLOOKUP to find it in seconds. For example, if you want to find the price of a wireless mouse, enter =XLOOKUP ("Wireless Mouse", A2:A100, B2:B100). Excel searches for Wireless Mouse in column A and returns its price from column B. That’s it. You don’t need to sort the sheet or hunt for the right row. You can even replace the product name in the formula with a cell reference, making it easy to look up different products whenever you need to. IF Let Excel make decisions for you Let’s stick with that product sheet for a minute. Say you want to check which products are running low in stock. Going through hundreds of entries and checking each quantity yourself sounds like a waste of time, right? The IF formula can handle that for you. For example, if stock quantities are in Column C, enter =IF (C2 in the next column. The formula checks the quantity in C2 and displays “Restock” if it’s below 10 or “In stock” if it’s 10 or more. You can drag the formula down to apply it to every product on your list. I like this because you don’t have to keep checking the same numbers every time you open the sheet. Excel flags the products that need attention, and you can focus on what needs restocking. COUNTIF Count matching entries without lifting a finger This happened to me every time I had to deal with a long list of names or entries in Excel. I’d end up counting them manually, lose track halfway through, and start all over again. It was annoying, especially when I just needed a quick count and had other things to finish. That’s when COUNTIF comes in handy. It counts cells that match a condition you specify, so you don’t have to go through the list one entry at a time. Say I have a spreadsheet of customer orders and want to know how many are marked “Pending.” If the order status is in column D, I’d use =COUNTIF (D2:D100, "Pending"). Excel counts the cells marked “Pending” and gives me the total. It saves me from repetitive counting and those silly mistakes I make when I rush. IFERROR Get rid of ugly Excel errors with one simple formula Nothing makes a spreadsheet look messier than a bunch of #N/A and #VALUE! errors staring back at you. I’ve had this happen while working with lists copied from different sheets, and it’s frustrating when I’m trying to get a quick answer but end up wondering what went wrong. IFERROR lets you decide what Excel should display when a formula runs into an error. For example, if I’m using XLOOKUP to find a product price and the product isn’t on the list, Excel might return #N/A. I can wrap the formula in IFERROR like this: =IFERROR (XLOOKUP( "Keyboard", A2:A100, B2:B100), "Product not found") Instead of an error message, Excel displays “Product not found.” It’s a small change, but it makes my spreadsheets easier to read and saves me from staring at errors every time something doesn’t match. TRIM Clean up messy text without fixing every cell by hand Copying data from websites and pasting it into Excel sounds easy until you notice that half the names have weird spaces. This has happened to me when putting together lists from different sources. Some entries looked fine, but those extra spaces could mess up searches and make matching names harder than they needed to be. I wasn’t going to fix every cell manually. That’s why I like the TRIM formula. It removes the extra spaces from text while keeping single spaces between words. If a name is in cell A2, I’d enter =TRIM(A2) in another cell. Excel cleans up the text for me, and I can use the cleaned version instead. One quick formula beats checking every entry by hand. NETWORKDAYS Calculate working days without counting every date on the calendar My dad once needed to figure out how many working days fell between two dates, and we actually sat there counting days on a calendar. Yes, manually! We had to skip weekends, and it got confusing pretty quickly. That’s when I realized Excel could do this for us in seconds. The NETWORKDAYS formula does exactly what you’d expect. Say my dad wants to count working days between October 1 and October 15. He can enter =NETWORKDAYS (A2, B2), with the dates in cells A2 and B2, and Excel counts the weekdays while skipping Saturdays and Sundays. If he wants to exclude public holidays too, he can add those dates to the formula. Work smarter, not harder Start with these six, try them on your own spreadsheets, and see how much easier the boring stuff gets.