Adding a function to customized status bar in Excel

Is there a way to add a function to the customized status bar in Excel 2007?

I want to include a subtract method next to functions such as SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, etc.

Alex

Posted 2012-09-18T18:24:58.260

Reputation: 133

Also, SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MINIMUM, and MAXIMUM are all defined when more than two cells are selected -- DIFFERENCE would not be. – Scott – 2012-09-18T19:26:26.437

Yes, I figured it was not implemented due to the cell property constraints as mentioned by @pnuts. So I will have to find an alternate solution that could increase my worksheet productivity. Thanks for the feedback. – Alex – 2012-09-19T13:57:14.527

Answers

Here's a workaround. I took IBM's opening and closing stock prices for the month (from http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ibm/historical) and then duplicated the data in the negative:

screen shot of Excel shhet with E4 = -B4, etc.

Now I can subtract any two numbers by selecting one and the negative of the other. For example, IBM gained 57¢ in trading on 9/14:

screen shot of same sheet with C11 and E11 (i.e., -B11) selected

Scott

Posted 2012-09-18T18:24:58.260

Reputation: 17 653

1Excellent! so the hack will involve creating a macro that can convert a column to negative value? – Alex – 2012-09-20T14:11:07.633

1I've been fiddling with some of the function's in Excel and found the =IMSUB function which in contrast will just calculate the difference of two cells as long as they are real numbers.

It would look like this for @Scott's example: =IMSUB(C11,B11)

=>The output would be 0.57 only caveat is that would require another column in your workbook as oppose to the result appearing in the customized header. – Alex – 2012-10-10T19:59:03.360

Dick Kusleika addressed this in 2004, see here:

http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2004/12/09/selection-stats/#comments

(look through the comments on the article too.) A drawback with this approach is that Excel's standard status messages are no longer visible.

aidey

Posted 2012-09-18T18:24:58.260

Reputation: 111

And will this work for Excel 2016? – wizlog – 2016-06-16T21:22:54.620

Interesting discussion thread. Thank you for sharing this information with us. – Alex – 2012-09-20T14:29:58.950