For this lesson you need to open First Quarter Sales and Profit 2 from your Sample Files folder.
I'll begin by clicking in cell A9 to make this the active cell. And I'm going to type the word Total into this cell, followed by the Tab key. When I press the Tab key, I expect the active cell to move right to cell B9, so I'll press the Tab key now.
In cell B9, I'm going to use an AutoSum. To do that I need to click the Home tab on the Ribbon and, in the Editing group, you'll notice that there's an AutoSum button. I'll click the AutoSum button now, and something interesting has happened to the worksheet.
Excel has placed a marquee around the number range that AutoSum has guessed we want to work with. The pattern of dots that marks the boundary of the marquee are called the Marching Ants. That really is the technical term for them. The Marching Ants surround all of the numbers in the column above, up to the first blank cell or text cell. In this case up to the word Jan, because cell B3 is the first cell that has a non-numeric value within it.
In cell B9 you can see =SUM(B4:B8). This is your first glimpse of an Excel formula. Formulas always begin with an equals sign. This formula is using the Sum function to compute the sum, that's another word for the total, of the values in cells B4 to B8.
In order to see the total sales for January for all branches, I now need to either click the AutoSum button again or press the Enter key. I think I'll click the AutoSum button again and I can see that, for all of my branches, I sold 129,000 for January.
As well as wanting to add all the numbers in a column, you'll often also want to add all of the numbers in a row. So I'll click on cell E3 and type the word "Total" into the cell. This time I'll press the Enter key, because I want the active cell to move down one cell to cell E4. So I'll press the Enter key now.
Once again I'm going to put an AutoSum into cell E4. To do that I click the Home tab on the Ribbon and in the Editing group I'll click AutoSum. And this time, you can see that the marquee is surrounding cells B4 to D4. The reason they've stopped, and not included cell A4, is because New York is text and not a numeric value. So AutoSum knows that it should stop at cell B4.
Once again I need to either click the AutoSum button again, or press the Enter key. I think this time I'll press the Enter key and I can see that, in the first quarter, the New York branch had total sales of 70,000.
All that remains now is to save your work, so I'll click File at the top left of the screen and Save As. And as usual I won't save this in Session 2, I'll save it to the folder above Session 2 so that I don't overwrite my sample file. And this time I'll save the file as: First Quarter Sales and Profit 3.
I click the Save button, and you've now completed Lesson 2-3: Use AutoSum to Quickly Calculate Totals.