Forum Discussion
Excel cell calculation
Hi all, first timer here. In Mac Excel I’m wanting to calculate a selling price minus a cost price times the amount of items. So cell D4 is $3, minus cell C4 which is $1, multiplied by 18 items B4....
HiSimon55
welcome!
The issue is with the way Excel handles the order of operations. Multiplication happens before subtraction, so your formula:
=D4-C4*B4
is being calculated as:
= D4 - (C4 * B4)
= 3 - (1 * 18)
= -15
What you actually want is the difference between selling price and cost price, multiplied by the number of items. To make sure Excel does that, add parentheses:
=(D4 - C4) * B4
That gives:
= (3 - 1) * 18
= 36
So the fix is simply to use parentheses to control the calculation order.