Excel 2011 is a great choice when you need to sort and organize data. But it can do much more than that, including giving you the option of performing mathematical functions on your data.
So if you have a column of data containing numbers that you want to add together, you can use a formula to add up those numbers and give you a total. The method below will teach you how to enter that formula in the cell where you want to display the added total.
Sum a Column of Data in Excel 2011
The steps below are going to use the AutoSum function of Excel to automatically select the data in your column that you want to add up.
You can, however, enter the formula into a cell yourself. The format of that formula is =SUM(XX:YY), where XX is the location of the top cell that you want to add, and YY is the location of the bottom cell. For example, adding up the data in cells A1-A20 would require the formula =SUM(A1:A20).
Step 1: Open the spreadsheet containing the column of data that you want to add together.
Step 2: Click inside the cell under the column data that you want to add up. In the image below, I am going to be adding up the data in column C.
Step 3: Click the Formulas tab in the green bar at the top of the window.
Step 4: Click the AutoSum button.
Step 5: Confirm that the selected data is what you want to add up, then press the Enter key on your keyboard.
If you are having trouble identifying data in a large spreadsheet as you scroll down, then learn how to freeze the top row of a spreadsheet in Excel 2011.
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