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POWER and SQRT practice

POWER handles growth and area; SQRT undoes a square. Both come up in pricing and in anyone else's spreadsheet.

POWER(number, power) · SQRT(number)

What this lesson covers

SQRT of a negative number fails on purpose, because no real number squares to a negative.

3 exercises in this lesson

  1. Task 1 · cell E10

    Square the units in C2.

  2. Task 2 · cell E10

    Find the square root of the revenue in E2.

  3. Task 3 · cell E10

    Find the square root of 144.

Using POWER and SQRT at work

The syntax is POWER(number, power) · SQRT(number). Once it is in your hands, the work it replaces is the kind of thing that used to mean scrolling a column and hoping you did not miss a row.

This is lesson 34 of 37. It takes a few minutes, and the exercises are marked the moment you submit rather than at the end.

Where people usually slip

  • Ranges drift. Pointing at three cells when the data has six is the single most common cause of a wrong total, and it is invisible because the answer still looks plausible.
  • Copying breaks a reference. Relative references shift when a formula is copied. If a value should stay put, lock it with dollar signs.
  • The number is right, the method is not. Typing a total by hand produces the right answer once. A formula produces it again when the data changes, which is the actual skill.

How this is marked

Each exercise is checked against the result the formula should produce, and then re-run on a different set of numbers. A hardcoded answer passes the first check and fails the second, so it is rejected. That second pass is the part that makes the practice stick.

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