Operators & Operator Precedence

Excel formulas utilize a variety of operators, which are symbols that indicate what mathematical, logical, concatenation, or other operation you would like the formula to perform.

There are 4 different operator types in Excel:

Reference: To combine ranges of cells for calculations with these operators.

Ex. Range Operator (:), Union Operator (,), Intersection Operator (Space), Negation (-)

Arithmetic: To perform basic mathematical operations, or to combine numbers and produce numeric results.

Ex. Addition (+), Subtraction/Negation (-), Multiplication (*), Division (/), Percent (%), Exponentation (^)

Text Concatenation: Use the ampersand (&) to join, or concatenate, one or more text strings to produce a single piece of text.

Ex. Connect or Concatenate Two Values to Produce One Continuous Text Value (&)

Comparison/Logical: With the operators in the table below, you can compare two values. When two values are compared by using these operators, the result is a logical value either TRUE or FALSE.

Ex. Equal to (=), Greater than (>), Less than (<), Greater than or Equal to (>=), Less than or Equal to (<=), Not equal to (<>)

When Excel calculates the value of a formula, it uses rules to determine the order in which it should calculate the various parts of the formula. Operator precedence follows as such:

Reference - Multiplication & Division - Addition * Subtraction - Text Concatenation - Comparison/Logical

You can also override Excel’s order of precedence through parentheses: Expressions within parentheses are always evaluated first.

Ex. ( B2 - B3 ) * B4, B2 - B3 will be evaluated first because it is within the parentheses.