Our review of these techniques will focus on the manual entry of formulas, but check out our tutorial on using Excel if you need a refresher on formula entry for core functions. A function’s syntax refers to the layout of the function and includes the function’s name, brackets, comma separators, and arguments.

How to Find Roots in Excel

For this function, you must only supply the number argument, which is the number for which a square root must be found. It can be any positive number or a cell reference to the location of the data in a worksheet. For the POWER() function, you’ll supply as arguments both the number and its exponent. To calculate a root, simply supply an inverse exponent — for example, a square root is 1/2. The POWER() function is useful for both powers and exponents. For example: yields 16, whereas: also yields 16, which is the square root of 256. Roots are the inverse of powers. In this example, the formula =D3^(1/3) is used to find the cube root of 216, which is 6.