10 Excel Functions Every Office Worker Should Know

Most people learn SUM and AVERAGE early and stop there. But a handful of other functions do most of the heavy lifting in real office spreadsheets — and they're not hard to pick up once you've seen them in action.

IF lets a cell react to a condition — marking an order 'Late' or 'On Time' automatically instead of typing it by hand. COUNTIF and SUMIF go a step further, counting or adding values that match a condition, like totaling sales for one branch out of a long list.

VLOOKUP (or its modern cousin, INDEX/MATCH) is the one that impresses managers — it looks up a value in one table and pulls back matching information from another, which is exactly how price lists, staff records and inventory sheets are usually connected.

Rounding out the list: TEXT for formatting numbers and dates consistently, TRIM for cleaning messy pasted data, TODAY for dates that update automatically, IFERROR for hiding ugly error messages, and CONCATENATE for joining text from separate cells.

None of these need to be memorised in one sitting. In our Professional Computer Basics Course, they're taught the way they're actually used — through small, realistic exercises, not abstract formulas on a whiteboard.