The status bar in Excel is located at the bottom of the Excel window and provides information about the active cells, such as the average, count, sum, and other statistics. By default, the status bar displays basic information, but you can customize it to display the information that you need. In this lesson, you will learn what is and how to use Status Bar.
Introduction
The table in this example are the sales volumes of products that belong to two categories.
You want to quickly find out what is the total or average sales and how much has been sold? You could use the SUM, and AVERAGE, COUNT to obtain this information, but much faster will check the data and look at the status bar (at the bottom of the screen) where all this information is given (the numerator gives the number of selected items and ignores empty cells).
Average, Count and Total are the standard settings of the status bar, but you can change them by right-clicking on the status bar. At this moment you are only interested in the options marked in the figure below a red frame.
Formatting
Let's add a Minimum and Maximum. Now five additional information will be given the status bar.
Note that all calculations are made without the blank cells, so if you assume 4 products failed to sell at all and delete their data, the average will be calculated only for the 6 products and will be 17, and the sale will be given a minimum value of 2. Not zero!
To avoid such problems for products that failed to sell, enter zero. In the figure below the correct values are calculated, the average is 12 and minimum 0.
Adjusting the status bar in Excel is a simple process that allows you to customize the information displayed in the status bar. By selecting the statistics that you want to display, or by using a formula or macro, you can easily access the information that you need to effectively manage your data.
Further reading: Getting started with Excel SUM function Min/Average/Max Column Chart