Gaurav is back with the next installment in our Numbers tutorial series, diving into one of the most essential spreadsheet skills: the SUM function. Whether you're tracking expenses or organizing data, learning to total values quickly is a must.
Quick Guide: Summing Your January Expenses
- Select the Cell – Click the cell where you'd like the total to appear.
- Start the Formula – Type
=and thenSU. Use the arrow keys to highlightSUMand press Enter. - Set the Range – Type your cell range, like
B2:B5, and close with a). - Finish – Hit Enter. Boom—your total is ready!
Want to Make a Change? Just press Option + Enter to jump into the formula editor, tweak your formula, and press Command + Enter to apply it.
Introduction to Basic Formulas
- Learn how to analyze and manage data with formulas
- Focus: Using the SUM function to total values easily
Using the SUM Function
- Adds up all values in a defined range
- Common use: Insert a “Total” row to sum a column’s data
- Enter the function where the total should appear
How to Enter the SUM Formula
- Navigate to the desired cell
- Press Option + Enter to begin editing
- Type
=to start the formula - Enter
SU, then selectSUMwith the arrow keys
Inserting the Formula Example
- In cell
B6, type:=SUM(B2:B5) - Press Enter to apply and see the result
Editing a Formula
- Click the Total cell
- Press Option + Enter to enter edit mode
- Use arrow keys to move around and edit
- Press Command + Enter to save changes
Pro Tips
- Use larger ranges for more data, like
B2:B1000 - Press Option + Enter anytime to reopen the formula editor
- Arrow keys let you fine-tune your formula line-by-line
Spreadsheet skills made simple—with Numbers on your Mac!
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Gaurav: okay folks so in this lesson we are now going to get into very basic formulas and formulas are very easy yet powerful methods of analyzing and playing around with our data. So today I'm going to use probably one of the most used function, which is the sum function. So it is a way of totaling all the values in a set of cells.
Gaurav: So what we're going to do is, again, jump back into our table.
Gaurav/VoiceOver: Food. Rowhead or cell? Cell. water row header cell transportation row header cell internet row header cell row header cell cell okay so we have all of our headings in the category headings in column a internet row header cell and i'm going to add one more row here called total caps lock on insert cap cap at row headers total row header cell okay january empty cell january now i want to total up all of the data in the january column
Gaurav: Okay, so the total is right now empty.
Gaurav: I'm going to go into cell B6, which is at the bottom of the column containing the January data right now. I'm going to hit option plus enter to start editing the cell. I'm going to press the equal sign. And you hear it said formula editor. That means we're now creating a formula. I'm going to type SU because the formula we want to enter is called the sum.
Gaurav: I'm just going to type SU. SU.
Gaurav: Now, once you type the letters SU, what we can't see, but what is there on the screen is now a quick formula selector, which means any formulas that start with the function SU are now available for us to select from. I'm going to press the right arrow key.
VoiceOver: SUBTOTAL, SUM, SUMIF, SUMIFS, SUMFORGOT, SUMS, SUMS2MI2, SUMS2PI2.
Gaurav/VoiceOver: So here are various formulas that we can enter. I'm going to go back to SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SUM SU B2 because that's the first row that we want to start adding all the values from.
Gaurav: I'm going to hit the colon key twice.
VoiceOver: Colon, colon.
Gaurav: And I'm going to hit type in B5. Copy. I'm going to now type the right parenthesis to close the formula.
Gaurav: I'm going to hit enter. So now you can see it has totaled up all of the data in the January column. So let's just recap what we did. We went into the cell where we wanted to insert the formula.
Gaurav: we type the equal key and then we've typed a few letters in the formula that we wanted to enter in this case sum so I typed SU and then I use the left and right arrow keys to explore and find the formula which I wanted to enter once I found it I hit enter and then after that it said value argument placeholder which means it had automatically inserted the
Gaurav: format for the formula. I typed b2 because that's where I first wanted to start the calculation of all the totals. I hit the colon key twice and then I typed b5 and then I hit the right parenthesis key and then I hit enter. So b2 colon colon b5 is how we say that we want to sum up all of the values from cell b2 to cell b5.
Gaurav: If you have a longer range of data, you can do cell B2 to B100 or B2 to B1000, whatever you want. But it's a very quick and easy way for you to quickly add all of the values in a column. So that is an easy way for you to insert formulas. Let's see how to edit a formula in case we want to. So I'm going to back into the total.
Gaurav: I'm going to hit option plus enter to start editing.
Gaurav: So there you heard that we're in the formula editor.
Gaurav: So now we're in the formula editor after hitting option plus enter.
Gaurav: We can now again use the left and right arrow keys to simply explore what is in the formula in case you want to make any changes.
VoiceOver: Right paren. Close B2B5. Range. Sum. Function. Sum. Function. Sum. Function. B2B5. Range. In edit text sum. Right paren. Closing function. Right paren. B2B5. Range.
Gaurav: So here you can see that we've just explored the formula in case we want to fix any errors that might be there. we can use Option plus Enter to enter into the edit cursor in a specific cell, use the left and right arrow keys to explore all the various aspects of the formula, and then just make any edits that we want to the formula and then hit Command plus Enter to close out the editing.
Gaurav: So that's a quick, simple guide to how to use formulas on numbers.