How to Create a Sum Formula in Excel

Microsoft Excel is a popular program that many employers use across various companies. It is popular for making charts and tables, and working with and organizing data. Many people use excel everyday and are not taking advantage of using the formulas available within the program. There are many formulas that will make your work get done faster and make you overall more efficient in Excel, but I will be covering creating a sum formula to find the total number of something within a data set without manually adding up numbers. This is especially helpful with large numbers or a large quantity of numbers.

1. Laptop or Computer
2. Microsoft Excel

Disclaimer - I will be showing the steps to make a sum formula in Microsoft Excel on a laptop that is using Windows 11. Some of the images provided during instruction may look different if you are on an Apple computer or using a different version of Windows.

Purchase and download Microsoft Excel to your computer. The program by itself costs $159.99. The program can be found by typing in "Microsoft Excel" into you internet search bar, then following the link to Microsoft's website. If you already have the program, you can skip this step completely.

Find Microsoft Excel on your computer by typing in the search bar "Excel" and clicking the green Excel icon to launch the program. After doing so, you will have the option to create a new file or open an existing one. If you are making a new data set, create a new file. If you want to add a sum formula to an existing file, you can find your recent files below when you launch the program.

Enter your data into Excel or copy data/tables that you have previously been working on. Since we are calculating the total sum, I am going to have a cell named "Total" in my sheet. In my example, I placed this under the population of various states.

Create a sum formula by first clicking on the cell that you want your sum or total to be in. You then want to type =SUM . After this, you will type in the range of cells that you want to be added together in the sum formula. You will see then see it say =Sum(number1, [number2]...) . This is where you enter the cells you want. In my example, the cells range from B3 to B8. So my formula is =SUM(B3:B8).

After you have the formula all typed out, you can press Enter on you keyboard. The formula is now active in that cell and you will see the sum of all of the numbers highlighted in the ranged you created in the formula. In the example, you see it calculates the sum of the population of various states and places the number automatically in the "Total" row. You have now successfully created use a sum formula in Microsoft Excel.