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Dear Rachael
Thank you for attending Excel Intermediate course!! I hope you enjoyed the course and benefited from it.

I believe you meant BODMAS in your question. This is the sequence that Excel uses to perform calculations.

BODMAS stands for Brackets, Order (or Exponent), Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction

When you are using more than one operator Excel uses this sequence.

Anything in brackets gets calculated first
Order (or Exponent) gets calculated next

Please remember that Division and Multiplication are in the same group meaning that if you have a formula with both division and multiplication the calculation is performed from left to right. But if you have a Division and Addition is in the formula then Division will be done before Addition.

The best example of this is that if you are trying to calculate average of cells 20, 30, 10 and 5.
You would ensure that the formula you enter would be (20+30+10+5)/4.

As you can see that we had to use the bracket in order to avoid Excel performing the division first.

Please remember that Addition and Subtraction are in the same group meaning that if you have a formula with both addition and subtraction the calculation is performed from left to right. But if you have Addition and Multiplication (from the other group) is in the formula then Multiplication will be done before Addition.

I hope this has answered your query.

If this has answered your query then I would request you to please mark the question as resolved!! If not and you have a specific question related to this then please post it as a new question and we should be able to provide you the solution for it!!

Kindest Regards


Rajeev Rawat
MOS Master Instructor 2000 and 2003
MCAS Master Instructor 2007