It’s well documented that I’m not a huge fan of spreadsheets. If I can use Word instead of Excel, I usually do. Of course, I’ve met people who have the opposite opinion and create vast lists of text in Excel that I would never, ever create. I just think it’s a whole lot easier to deal with Word tables than a whole huge spreadsheet.
The good news for people like me is that even though Word doesn’t have the calculating power of Excel, you can use it for basic math functions. Since basic math is just about all this human is capable of, I often find Word’s calculating feature is all I need to include simple numeric data in my documents. For example, in one of the business plans I wrote, I was able to use Word tables and calculate a simple balance sheet and sales forecast.
Tables like these don’t require anything more than addition, and Word is capable of adding the numbers in a column or row together for you. (The commands even look like they do in Excel, if it makes you feel better.) To add the numbers in a row, make sure you’ve entered all the data, except for the last cell where the result will be placed (generally the right-most cell). Then choose Table|Formula and you’ll see that it says =SUM(LEFT), which means "add all the numbers up to the left of the cell." After you click OK, you see that Word has magically put a number into the cell.
Adding a column of numbers works basically the same way. Enter all the data into your column except the last one at the bottom. Click that cell and choose Table|Formula. This time it says =SUM(ABOVE), which means "add up all the numbers above this cell."
If you are really ambitious, you can even enter your own simple calculations using standard Excel-like nomenclature. Even though the cell headings aren’t visible like they are in Excel, columns are letters and rows are numbers, so the first cell is A1. If you wanted to multiply your first cell with the second cell in a row you could type in =A1*B1 and Word tells you the answer.
One thing that can be confusing is that the calculations don’t necessarily update automatically. To update them, click the cell and press the F9 key. If you have more than one table to update, you can select the whole document by pressing Ctrl+A and then pressing F9.