Why this matters
Once records are in a tidy table, the next question from any manager is a question about them. How much did each branch sell? How many beneficiaries are women? What is the price of item code R25? Which phone numbers in the survey are missing a digit? Answering those questions quickly and correctly is the daily work of accounts officers, MIS officers and M&E assistants across Ghana.
You do not need hundreds of functions for this. A small set, used well on clean data, answers most of what offices ask. This section teaches that set.
What this section covers
- Everyday functions: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTIF, SUMIFS and IF. These answer "how much", "how many" and "which ones" questions.
- Lookups with XLOOKUP: pulling a matching detail from another table, such as a price from a price list. You will also learn to recognise VLOOKUP, which many offices still use.
- Sorting, filtering and data validation: finding what matters in a long list, and stopping bad data from being typed in the first place with dropdown lists and rules.
- Cleaning text and dates: fixing extra spaces, mixed capitals, phone numbers that lost their leading zero, and dates Excel cannot read.
How functions work
A function is a ready made formula with a name. You write the name, open a bracket, give it the information it needs (called arguments), separated by commas, and close the bracket. For example: