Use the F9 key whenever you want to understand or debug a formula.

And finally, the INT function gives us just the integer value, which corresponds to a person's age as of today. Next, the YEARFRAC function returns years as a fractional value. Working from the inside out, we see the start date and end date both evaluate to date serial numbers. You can see that the formula uses two functions: YEARFRAC and INT. Now let's look at the formula that calculates Age. Again, press Escape to exit without making changes. If the cursor is outside the last set of parentheses, or if nothing is selected, you'll see only the final result of the formula when you use F9. Pay attention to your selection before you press F9.

Press the Escape key to exit the formula editor without making changes. In this case, H5 evaluates to 'Minor', H6 evaluates to 'Adult', and the logical test evaluates to FALSE since Michael is only 12 years old. Once you have an argument selected, press the F9 key to evaluate. For example, when we click anywhere inside the IF function, we see its three arguments listed in the tooltip, and we can simply click to select each argument in the formula. To display the tooltip, click directly on or inside any function. Once you're in Edit Mode, you can use the F9 key to check the calculated value of any part of the formula.Īlthough you can select parts of the formula manually, the Function Tooltip makes it much easier to select things precisely. And you may want to expand the formula bar to give yourself more space to work. In general, it's easier to debug a formula in the formula bar. Now let's use the F9 key to see what the STATUS formula is doing. You can see that both Age and Status are calculated values. You can do this quickly by using Go To Special > Formulas. We've covered this before, but whenever you inherit a new worksheet, make sure you understand first where the formulas are. In addition to names, we have a column for birthdate, a column for age, and a column for legal status. In this video, we'll look at how to use the F9 key to quickly break a formula down into pieces that you can understand. One thing you'll frequently do in Excel is check or debug formulas.

Mac equivalent of excel f9