Introduction

Recipe 1.10 introduced you to Excel's built-in mathematical functions . These functions include things such as taking square roots, computing sines and cosines, inverting matrices, and performing summations. Excel's mathematical functions are pretty much the bread and butter of many of the computations discussed throughout this book. You can think of these as calculator functions, in that they offer the same functionality you'd expect from a scientific calculator. In this regard, these functions are essential for scientific and engineering calculations in Excel. This chapter covers many of Excel's built-in mathematical functions; others are treated in different chapters where they seem to fit better in specific contexts.