The most common thing you will thing you will do in Google Sheets is to use the sum formula. You will be surprised to know how easy it is to learn.
Luckily for you we are going to cover this in this guide.
Remember one small thing. Google Sheets can calculate a column range with numbers only.
How to Sum Google Sheets Column without Formula
Wait What!? Are you wondering if there is really a way to sum without formula. Yes there is and it is a quick way.
Just select the whole column or some cells. Then look at the status bar on bottom right to get the value of the total sum. However, if you will need to use this value on some other cell you will have to use the sum formula.
Use the SUM Function to sum a column
In this example we will assume you run an online store and you want to calculate the sum of your sales.
Simply go to the end of the column or to the end of the range above which you want to calculate your sum and double-click cell and type =SUM
Google Sheets will open up a toolkit to tell you that using this formula you can calculate sum of a series of numbers and/or cells.
Don’t forget to use round brackets in front of he formula to define the range of the sum e.g. =SUM(B2:B10)
You can also sum cells using cell number and separating it with a comma e.g. =SUM(B2,B5,B6,B9)
Important tips about SUM Formula
Here are some tips and reminders on the usage of SUMS function in Google Sheets as listed by Google.
- You can either use a range or cells in the formula. Or you can also use a combination of both.
- Google Sheets will try to guess the range of your sum but you can also enter manually.
- In case of sum of range any cell added within the range will automatically be added to the final sum.
- To calculate sum of a whole column use =SUM(A:A) where A is the column that you want to sum
- Remember sum only words for numeric values so any text will be ignored
One small but very important advice we have for you is to check format of added values. Make sure that all values are numeric by going to menu Format > Number otherwise Google Sheets sum formula will not give you correct results.
Hope you learned from this. Don’t forget to check out other tips on our blog.
All the way from guides on how to freeze rows in Google sheets to putting up a Google Sheets checkbox, we have got it all covered.
I love understanding how different technologies work and explaining them to people. From tech guides to opinions, everything is interesting to me. Other than that, I enjoy writing about various science-related topics and conversing with people.