Excel offers a function that returns a value of Pi by using the PI() function. What is the value of Pi though? Is it the approximation from school of 22/7? Is it a fixed number of decimals? Does it matter what you use? The answer of course is that it depends. You might remember that the formula involves Pi somehow and the radius somehow.

Consider the formula for the area of a circle for example. The first point is that while it is definitely possible to create your own formula for lots of things in Excel you should probably avoid doing so wherever possible. Which gives us an idea about why we move to functions soon after we start using Excel. It is only multiplying two numbers and has no idea about the units you've used or the units of the number that you have ended up with. Of course Excel has no idea in this case what you are actually trying to do. Assuming that the length and the width were entered in the same units, your answer should come out fairly accurately. This formula has a simple '=' symbol followed by the cell addresses for the cell containing the width and the length numbers. In a third cell you enter a formula to compute the area of the rectangle. So for example you might have the length of a rectangle recorded in a cell and the width in another cell. Pretty soon afterwards they work out the power of being able to have a cell's value calculated based on the values of some other cells. They probably start off entering numbers or text in a cell and then in adjacent cells. What happens when someone first encounters Excel.

Efficiency, simplicity and comprehensibility - why wouldn't you want to use it?.

Once created, debugged and tested, these functions can become part of a function suite in an organisation.

LAMBDA functions help reduce complexity in spreadsheets because you can create a complex function, encapsulate it, test it and then reproduce this throughout a spreadsheet.

These functions don't need VBA to be enabled so don't present any (or as many) security issues as a VBA function does.

Use LAMBDA to create your own functions.This article aims to explain what the LAMBDA function is and why the LAMBDA function might be valuable to you in your use of Excel.

Depending on the subscription that you are on, it may or may not be available for you yet as it might only be in beta versions but it is only a matter of time before it becomes part of the set of functions available to you. It can be summarised as the ability to create your own user defined functions without having to use Visual Basic for Applications ('VBA'). One of the most exciting things about Excel 365 is the new LAMBDA function.

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