Microsoft Excel - Most Common Function Groups

Microsoft excel has a lot of functions that you can use for the worksheets that you use. To see all of the functions that are available, refer to reference available in Microsoft Excel (or Google "Excel" followed by one of the below categories that is in bold to see all the functions in that category!). These functions are often performed to manipulate, modify, change, or view the data in the cells of a Microsoft Excel worksheet. The list of all of these worksheet functions can be found are at the official Microsoft Excel reference that is available with the Microsoft Excel product.

The functions are separated into categories. I will talk about the different categories and what kind of functions are available in each category

These functions are just some of the functions that are available in Microsoft Excel. Most of them cannot be used very efficiently just by themselves. You have to know when to use which one and how to use them together to perform the proper function in an Excel worksheet cell to achieve the desired result.

Database functions

When you use an Excel worksheet in conjunction with a database you can use these functions to perform mathematical calculations from the data retrieved from the database entries.

Date and time functions

A cell with a date and time function usually modifies some text to convert it to a date or different parts of that date. Most of the functions convert serial numbers to dates and dates to serial numbers.

Engineering functions

This group of functions is fairly advanced and has operations that are done at the engineering level which probably won't be necessary for any common tasks.

Financial functions

There are a lot of financial calculations that are done for example investments and assets. There are functions available in this category that will help with those calculations.

Information functions

These kinds of functions return information about the cell, whether it is text, an integer, a Boolean, etc. along with other related information

Logical functions

This category includes the basic logic of functions such as "and", "or", "if", "true", and "false". These kinds of functions are often used with cells, inside of nested functions.

Lookup and reference functions

These functions return properties and information about objects that you use in the function such as a row number or for looking up the value of an array.

Math and trigonometry functions

These are the basic mathematic and trigonometric functions that are available and are often used by mathematicians and also to perform basic tasks.

Statistical functions

Anything related to probability and statistics can be found here in this statistical category.

Text functions

Any kind of manipulation you want to do to a string of text can be found in this category of functions.

External functions

There are two functions in this category that convert Euros and also perform SQL requests which are not very common functions.

The usefulness of this list is realized when you want to find out what kind of functions are available to you in a certain category of work for whcih you are using Microsoft Excel. Searching for help on a specific category of functions in Microsoft Excel will liekly yield much better search results as opposed to searching for random available Excel functions. The above is an official Microsoft Excel function categories.