RE: excel
There are lots of different kinds of formulas, far too many to list here. Please can you tell us what you want to do and then we can give you help on specific formulas?
Some simple ones are SUM to sum fields, LEFT to return a set number of characters to the left of a field, RIGHT to return a set number of characters to the right of a field, vlookup to see if a value in one set of data exists in another.