What is the excel formula to calculate the change from one column to the next?

Answer 1

That will depend on what exactly you mean. If you have totals for numbers in column A and also for column B and wanted to know the difference, you would subtract one from the other. So if your total for figures in column A was in cell A20 and those for column B were in cell B20, then you could have a formula in your spreadsheet, maybe in cell B22, to find the difference like this:

=B20-A20

If you then had totals for column C and for column D and so on, you would have a corresponding formula each time, like:

=C20-B20

=D20-C20

=E20-D20

To get those you could just copy the first formula across into each column. A similar formula would be used if it was for individual values rather than totals that you were checking differences for. So if you wanted to get the difference between A2 and B2, then in C2 you could have the formula:

=B2-A2

That formula could be copied down to get the corresponding differences for the other cells.

Sometimes these formulas will give you positive values, but sometimes you will get negatives, indicating the change is a downward one. So if one total was 20 and the next was 16, then the difference would be -4 when you do your calculation. If you are not concerned with whether it is higher or lower, but just the amount of the difference, so in this case all you would want is to know that the difference was 4, then you could use the ABS function around the formula that was getting the difference. ABS gives you the absolute value, ignoring whether it is positive or negative. So taking the last formula shown, you would have something like this:

=ABS(B2-A2)

That will give you 4.