Are you familiar with Excel spreadsheets? Have you ever created a formula in a cell for a specific purpose? If so, you may have encountered a situation where cell B15 contains the formula =B14+B15, and wondered “what have I created?”.

The answer is simple – this formula creates an incremental total. Incremental totals are a way to track the sum of your data as it changes over time. This can be an invaluable tool when you are dealing with a large set of complex numbers.

For example, if you have a table of sales figures for each month, with line items for each product, you can use an incremental total to sum up the total sales of each month quickly. To see how this is done, let’s walk through an example.

Let’s say that you have a spreadsheet with the following data in it:

Month	Product A	Product B	Product C
January	100	150	200
February	110	160	210
March	120	170	220

To calculate the total sales for each month, you would need to add up the numbers for each product. This can be a tedious task, unless you use an incremental total. To do this, you would enter the formula =B14+B15 in cell B15, and then copy it down the column for each month.

After that, your spreadsheet should look like this:

Month	Product A	Product B	Product C
January	100	150	200
February	110	160	210
March	120	170	220
Total	330	480	630

As you can see, the incremental total formula quickly adds up the contents of each row and displays the total sales for each month. This is a much faster and more efficient way of calculating totals for large sets of data.

So, if cell B15 contains the formula =B14+B15, you have created an incremental total! This simple formula can help you quickly calculate totals for any set of data, saving you time and effort.