School assignment: Excel worksheets.

[Mike U.]

I am attending a college-level computer applications course, and in my Excel
training, I have to format a pre-existing Excel sheet that has been made for
me. I've been having some problems, especially with this:

"In cell M4, type the word "Allowance". In cell M5, type "0.32" (the amount
paid per mile). In cell M8, write a Formula that multiplies the mileage in
cell L8 by the mileage allowance in cell M5. (Remember to use an Absolute
Reference to cell M5 and a relative reference to L8.) Copy the formula to
cells M9:M11."

I tried using the =PRODUCT(L8:$M5) formula, but for some reason, it always
changes L8 to L5 and M5 to M8. Why is this?

 

[db]

You have to put the dollar sign in front of the row number as well if it is
the row number you don't want to change, i.e.:

=PRODUCT($L$8:$M$5)

This formula will always reference L8 and M5 no matter which cell you paste
this formula into.

 

[Duke Carey]

OK, Mike, did you read the Help file about the PRODUCT() function? It is
going to multiply all the cells in the range by one another. So you are
telling Excel to perform

=L5*M5*L6*M6*L7*M7*L8*M8

and that really is not what you were asked to do. Matter of fact, you
should have gotten a circular reference error, since you were to put this
formula in cell M8.

You need something like
=m5*l8

It's something like that because I'll leave it to you to figure out the
relative and absolute addesses to use

The reason that Excel changed the address range for you is that it seems to
like the address for the top left corner of the range first, followed by the
address for the bottom right corner.

 

[Harlan Grove]

db wrote...

You have to put the dollar sign in front of the row number as well if it is
the row number you don't want to change, i.e.:

=PRODUCT($L$8:$M$5)

This formula will always reference L8 and M5 no matter which cell you paste
this formula into.

....

You either don't read OP carefully or you don't have a clue how to
answer this question. Did you miss this sentence in the OP?

"(Remember to use an Absolute Reference to cell M5 and a relative
reference to L8.)"

How does your formula leave L8 a relative reference? Do you have a clue
what relative and absolute references are? There's no evidence in your
responses that you do.

Both the OP's formula and your formula are WRONG. PRODUCT(L8:M5) will
automatically be changed to PRODUCT(L5:M8) on entry, and that's the
product of all cells in the range L5:M8, so cells L5, L6, L7, L8, M5,
M6, M7 and M8. What the OP needs is the product of ONLY cells M5 and
L8. It'd be valid to use PRODUCT with both cells as *SEPARATE*
arguments, so a comma between them rather than a colon. However, better
still would be using the multiplication operator, *, rather than the
PRODUCT function.