How to add and sum in Google Sheets (Addition and SUM function)

Key Takeaways

in this video i'm going to show you how to add and sum in google sheets so first let's start off with basic addition and in this example we'll simply add two numbers to each other so here in cell a2 i'm going to type equals one plus two and then press enter and of course our formula has given us a result of three and so this is how you can add numbers in google sheets where you're typing the numbers directly into the formula but if you want you can use cell references with your addition formula so that you can add numbers together where the numbers are entered into spreadsheet cells so here in cell a3 and a4 we have the numbers 1 and 2 and we're going to add those numbers together by referring to the cells that they are in so i'm going to type equals a3 plus a4 now i press enter and again our formula has given us a result of 3 because we're adding together cells a3 and a4 alright so now you know how to use the plus sign to add in google sheets but now let's go over the sum function which will allow you to automatically add multiple numbers together by simply specifying the range that the numbers are in so here we have the same list of numbers from one of the previous examples but instead of adding the cells together individually one at a time we're going to add all of them together by using the sum function so right here in cell a2 we've entered the formula equals sum parentheses a3 colon a and then we press enter and what we're telling google sheets is to add up all of the numbers that are in column a starting at row 3 and it's given us a result of 21. now in this case there's only numbers entered through row 8 but when we set the formula up like this and we do not specify an ending row then any numbers that we enter beyond row 8 will automatically be factored into this sum function and so this is why it's really good practice to put your sum function at the top of the column that way you can keep adding new numbers at the bottom and it won't get in the way of your formula because a lot of people like to put the sum function right at the bottom of their list and they need to move the formula every time they want to add new numbers now you can also use the sum function to sum a row instead of a column so here we have the same numbers entered into row one and we're going to add all of them together by using the sum function but we're going to refer to a row instead of a column so we've entered equals sum parentheses c1 colon one so we're telling google sheets add all of the numbers in row one starting at column c now here's a really fast and interesting way to sum if you don't want to enter a formula and you just really quickly want to find the sum of numbers that you've selected so here i'm going to select the range b2 through b8 and as you can see on the bottom right here google sheets is automatically displaying the sum of the numbers that are selected and if you want you can use this explore feature to do a variety of different calculations but the default will be sum now if you want you can select individual cells if i wanted to find the total of cells b2 b4 and b6 i would simply select those cells and again google sheets would automatically give me the sum of the numbers that are in the cells that i have selected if you need to you can sum an entire table of data where you're summing both rows and columns so here we have the total revenue earned for each product across multiple days and what we're doing is using the sum function to sum the data in the range b3 through f and how we did this was simply specified the range b3 colon f in the sum function and so this is how you can sum an entire table of data in google sheets now every now and then someone wants to know how you can sum only cells that are not blank and there's nothing special that you need to do this the sum function does not take into account blank cells because blank cells are considered as a zero value i hope you liked this video if you did please like and subscribe and have a great day