# 14.3: Understanding Formulas


Imagine that you are a manager of a construction company. You must maintain your staff budget to make sure you can afford to pay your employees and make a profit every year. You plan to pay the following employees accordingly:

Table $$\PageIndex{1}$$: Salary Information Calculations
Name Rate of Pay Hours per week Weekly Salary Annual Salary
Michael Jordan $16.75 40$ 670.00 $34,840.00 Lindsey Vonn$ 15.00 40 $600.00$ 31,200.00
Kirby Pucket $13.25 40$ 530.00 $27,560.00 You use your calculator and finally finish adding up the total salary owed to each employee when your new state regulations require you to provide each employee a$.04 per hour raise. You are frustrated because you must now take extra time to recalculate your spending plan all over again. However, you are using Excel, and you discover you don’t have to. This is because you used formulas connected to the cell reference content instead of a number. As a result, you can just insert the updated rate of pay, and Excel will automatically recalculate the weekly and annual salary. The formula entered in the Name box below is “B2*C2”. Which Excel uses to calculate the weekly salary in Column D.

14.3: Understanding Formulas is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Nick Heisserer.