Participation Project #10 Excel: Formulas and Functions III

Question 3 and 4

If the formula on the PDF starts with “=”, it’s one that can be copied and pasted directly from the PDF into Excel. If it doesn’t return a number or a result, you might have accidentally copied an extra space in front of the formula, so check that first if you’re not getting results. These formulas are long, and if it runs onto a second line on the PDF, sometimes Excel will copy the hard return into the formula bar, which prevents it from give you a result. To fix this, use the expansion arrow on the formula bar and manually delete the hard return. That should fix the issue!

This is an example of what the data may look like if it has an extra hard return:

To expand your screen, click the arrow at the end of the formula bar. This will help you see everything typed into the formula bar. 

Instead of adding an extra hard return, my computer put the formula into two separate cells, so when I expand, it looks like this:

Just recopy the formula into the expanded formula bar area and delete the hard return. This is before:

This is after:

Question 5

The future values function looks like this when you use the Insert Function feature and select FV as the function to insert:

Things to note: 

• Your rate should be entered as a decimal, not a percent.
• The Nper, or number of periods, is just how many days/months/years (in this case, years) forward that we want to predict.
• Your payment, unless specifically specified otherwise, will be 0.
• Your present value should have a negative sign in front of it, otherwise the future value will be negative (which we don’t want).

Enter each of these things into the appropriate boxes, and you should get results that look fairly close to the average price for each county!

Question 6

Your concatenate function looks like this:

You can incorporate blank cells and text by surrounding them with double quotes.

You can also concatenate as many things as you want. Every time you hit “tab” to go to the next box, it will add another below it. Don’t forget the closing parenthesis!