Hello, and welcome to a video on creating new variables in Excel. Creating variables
in Excel is pretty simple. You just need to know a couple of things about how Excel works and then you should be good to go.
First things first, if you've never used Excel before, this is called a cell. This is a cell, this is
a cell, and this is also a cell. All of these cells have names. This cell is
D1, and you can see it's name right here. This cell is J10. This one is
G10, and you can see that it makes sense because they line up with their
two portions of their name. Let's make
a new variable called ID. And in this case, I want to say that ID is equal to the
quantity 18 times 6 divided by 2. So 18 times 6
all over 2 and we'll hit enter. And I'm using the equal sign here to let Excel know that I'm doing
a math problem. And then I want it to do some math for me. Okay, so it's
equal to 54. I'm going to double-click on the side of this box, and it will automatically
populate 54 all the way down to our final variable.
If you don't want to double-click or you have a hard time double-clicking, you can also drag the edge of this box
down, and it will also populate it with 54. Just make sure you go all the way down to the end of your
numbers. Let's make another new variable, and we'll call it IV-3.
And in this case, when we say equals, we want to say equals
IV-1 times IV-2.
And we'll say that's equal to IV-3. So let's hit enter, and we get quite a big number,
and I'm going to go ahead and drag it down this time. Instead of double-clicking so you can see the difference.
Okay, what it's done is take each of these numbers, so 80 times 88.5,
the 7080, 78 times 93, is 7254, 80
times 80 is 6400, and so on and so forth.
A useful thing about Excel is that we can click in this box here, and we can see what our numbers
are that we're multiplying together. So if you're ever looking at your formula up here, and you're unsure if you've got
the right cell numbers in your formula, you can just click and have
a visual outline for what you have there. Okay, let's
make one more variable, we'll call it
IV4. And this time IV4 will be equals
IV2 divided by IV.
Okay, then I'll hit enter, so V2 divided by C2. This forward
slash symbol is the division symbol in Excel. Okay,
and I double-click that to populate it the whole way down. So now we have all of our numbers made. This is a whole
lot of math that we did not have to do. Excel did it for us.
All right, since we're here, I'll go ahead and show you another couple of tricks you can do with Excel. First things first,
let's talk about summing. So we can use the equals sum function
and open a parentheses. Select all of the numbers that we wanted to add up for
us.
Close the parentheses and hit enter, and there we go. Now we have the sum of all of the numbers
in this column. Here. If I wanted to drag this over this way,
now it's giving me the sum of all of the numbers in this column here. And I know that because I've clicked in my formula bar
and it's highlighting these numbers. If I wanted to drag that even further, it will
give me the sum of all of these numbers here. What are some other functions we
can use in Excel? Well, there are a lot. There's a function for almost everything you can think
of. If we wanted the mean, we would use equals average,
and let's find the average of the column we just found a sum for.
Okay, and it looks like it's 1.249543.
It would have been very tedious to add up all of these little numbers, and then divide them
by our N, but again, Excel did that part for us, so we don't have
to worry about it. Okay, and this was a little more than what you needed to do your first
assignment, so you should be good to go. Let us know if you have any questions, please reach out to one of the
tutors or your instructor if there aren't any tutors this semester, and have fun learning Excel.