What a formula guide is for
A formula guide answers one of two questions, which look alike but are not: how do I write a formula that does X, and what does the formula I already have actually do? The first is generation, the second is comprehension — and Excel users meet the second one far more often, in inherited workbooks, handover sheets, and columns that produce the right number for reasons nobody in the room remembers.
Both are covered here at the level of the individual function, with the formula written out plainly enough to read without an AI tool open beside it. The category question — what a formula generator is, and where it sits against Excel's own Insert Function dialog — is defined once in the Excel formula generator guide, and is not restated on these pages.
The function name is the part of a guide that stays useful after the tool changes, so each piece names the functions it uses: LEN and SUBSTITUTE for text, VLOOKUP and INDEX-MATCH for lookups, the byte-aware functions that behave differently on non-Latin data. Read them as reference material first and as product demonstration second.
