Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Doing Math Without Formulas or Programming

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Doing Math Without Formulas or Programming

You can copy a helper cell and perform a mathematical operation in the Paste Special dialog box to work with numbers in Excel. There are no formulas or programming code involved — just a few simple mouse clicks.

In the pictured example, a budget forecast shows anticipated numbers for the year. Notice that in the “After” picture, the numbers are 20% higher than in the “Before” picture, because the company wanted to add 20% to all “Before” numbers in their same cells, without using formulas or macros.



Step 1
Enter the numeric factor in some cell and copy that cell. In this example, because 20% will be added to all existing budget numbers, the numeric factor of 1.2 was entered into cell G1. This is because the existing budget numbers will need to be multiplied by 1.2 in order to be increased by 20%. In the picture, cell G1 is being copied, such as if you select the cell and and press Ctrl+C.



Step 2
Select the range of numbers that will be operated upon, and right-click that selected range. From the popup menu, select Paste Special.



Step 3
From the Paste Special dialog box, select the Values option in the Paste area, and select the Multiply option in the Operation area. Click OK, and that operation will happen for all selected cells.