Easy way to add multiple columns in excel

Have you been in a situation where you spend hours trying to add up values of multiple columns in excel? Have you ever wonder of ways you can total up these values more efficiently? This blog post will walk you through the different ways you can use to add up values in excel. 

If you are someone who just started on excel, you will be tempted to add up the cell one by one using the addition ("+") operator. For the example, it shows the sales data for a tea company, the total sales for quarter one is achieve by adding cell C4, C5, C6, C7 and C8 using the addition operator. You will then repeat these for the other three columns.

This approach is long and tedious. To be more efficient, you can actually use a SUM() function in excel to sum up the values in the column. You can write the function as such =SUM(C4:C8) where C4:C8 are cell range where the values resides in. 

To get the sum for the four quarter, you can hover your cursor to the bottom right corner of cell C9 and drag towards the right and there you will have the total for the sales for each of the four quarter.

There is an even more efficient method where you can total up the four quarter sales via the use of the AutoSum button in excel. You can do this by first highlighting cell C9 to F9 and click on the AutoSum button in the Editing ribbon of excel. You will have the total for the four quarter. 

Alternatively, you can also press hotkey Alt + = on your keyboard after you highlighted the cell range C9 to F9 to get the total of the four quarter. This will also gives you the same result if you prefer using shortcuts.
You can also check out the video at the start of this article to learn in detail on how to use the SUM function and also the AutoSum button in excel. The video will also highlight some of the shortcoming of using AutoSum in excel.