The status bar in Excel, located at the bottom of the Excel window, provides quick access to a variety of statistics about the selected cells. By default, it displays basic information such as average, count, and sum, but you can customize it to show other useful statistics like minimum and maximum values.
Understanding the Status Bar
The status bar can be a powerful tool for quickly analyzing data without having to manually enter formulas. Here’s an example of how it can be used:
To quickly find out the total, average, or how much has been sold, you can select the relevant cells and look at the status bar at the bottom of the screen. The status bar shows the total, average, and count of the selected cells, ignoring empty cells by default.
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.
Customizing the Status Bar
Let’s add Minimum and Maximum to the information displayed on the status bar. Now five additional information will be given the status bar.
Note that all calculations are made without blank cells. For example, if you delete data for 4 products that failed to sell, the average will be 17 for the remaining 6 products. The minimum sale will be 2.
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 the minimum 0.
Customizing the status bar in Excel is a simple yet powerful way to enhance your data analysis capabilities.
