Microsoft Excel Functions and Categories Quiz

Answer: Financial

The PMT or payment function, calculates the payment for a loan based on constant payments and a constant interest rate. So if you take a loan and have a set interest rate and a set time to pay it back, PMT will help to calculate how much each payment will be.

Answer: Statistical

Correlations enable you to see the relationship between different sets of numbers. The CORREL function allows comparisons between two sets. You could correlate the local temperature to the amount of ice cream a business sells, for example.

Answer: Statistical

The FREQUENCY function allows you to calculate how often certain values occur or the ranges which they occur in. This can be useful for things see what how many of each grade a set of exams fitted into.

Answer: Financial

This gives you the future value of an investment based on how much you pay in, how long you are paying in and the interest rate. So if you know you have a certain amount that you can save on a regular basis and the interest rate, you can work out how much your investment will be worth at some point, say after 5 years or 10 years.

Answer: Math & Trigonometry

COS is one you might remember from trigonometry classes. It is used in right-angled triangles. It is defined as the ratio of the lengths of the side adjacent to the right angle and the hypotenuse.

Answer: Financial

RATE gives you the interest rate for each period of an investment or a loan. This can be used with loans, mortgages, or any situation where you want to find out the rate of return over time.

Answer: Math & Trigonometry

LOG gives you a logarithm, which you might remember from school. It tells you to what power you need to raise a number (the base) to make another number.

Answer: Statistical

This function is used to give permutations, which are different ways numbers can be shown together. For example (1, 2, 3) is a different permutation than (2, 1, 3). Excel also has a function called COMBIN which can be used to get combinations of numbers. In that case (1, 2, 3) and (2, 1, 3) are the same combination of numbers.

Answer: Math & Trigonometry

MOD gives a modulus, or the remainder when you do a division with whole number results. For example 17 divided by 5 is 3 with a remainder, or modulus, of 2. In Excel it would be:

=MOD(17,5)

Answer: Financial

DB allows you to calculate the depreciation of an asset, or how much of its value it loses, in a set period of time.

Answer: Statistical

MIN is one of Excel's commonly used functions to simply find the lowest number in a set of numbers.

Answer: Math & Trigonometry

PRODUCT gives you the result of multiplying a set of numbers by each other. =PRODUCT(3,5,8) would multiply 3 by 5 by 8. Often, this is used with cell ranges, similar to SUM.

Answer: Financial

NPER is the function for calculating the number of periods for an investment based on periodic, constant payments and a constant interest rate. This could help you find out how many payments are required to repay a loan in full, or how long it will take an investment to reach a particular value.

Answer: Math & Trigonometry

The ROUND function will round a number to a set amount of digits, by specifying the number you want to round and the amount of decimal places. It will round up or down. So 6.26 rounded to one decimal place would give 6.3 as a result.
=ROUND(6.26,1)

If you rounded 6.23 to one decimal place, it will round it down to 6.2 as the result.
=ROUND(6.23,1)

Answer: Statistical

If you want to find the highest value, you can use MAX. If you wanted to find the second largest or the third largest etc., you can use the LARGE function. You can specify a range with the values and then a number corresponding to the position in the list that you are looking for. So =LARGE(A2:A15,4) will find the fourth largest value of those in the cells from A2 to A15.