A close look at the new Formula Keyboard in Excel for iPad.
One of the highlighted innovations in Excel for iPad is a dedicated Formula Keyboard which looks like this:
It’s necessary because none of the supplied iPad virtual keyboards work well when you’re trying to enter Excel formula. Hunting and pecking around different symbol keyboards gets tired very fast.
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Click on the ‘123’ button at top right to switch to the formula keyboard and ‘Abc’ to return to the standard keyboard.
This dedicated keyboard has a few trick beyond the obvious keys for brackets, comma, colon, percentage, arrows and the numbers.
Five keys have little green marks on the top right corner. Hold down any of these keys to see more, related, symbols.
For example, hold down the $ sign to enter cents, Yen/Renminbi, Euro, Pound and Won symbols
‘Under’ the round brackets are square and curly brackets.
The comma button has the semi-colon underneath it.
The colon button also has the @ and # symbols available.
Entering formula is much like in Excel for Windows or Mac. Press = then a list of common formula will appear or type in the name of the function you want. The function will appear and you can point to cells to enter them into the formula. The formula bar fills in with color coding to match the cells highlighted in the worksheet.
