formula-builder · Browser tool
Spreadsheet Formula Builder
Paste a formula and read it back argument by argument. Or describe one of the calculations people ask for most often and get the formula for Excel and for Google Sheets.
Read a formula back
Nothing here evaluates the formula. It is read as text, so a formula that refers to a workbook this page has never seen is fine.
Describe a calculation
This direction matches your wording against a fixed set of phrasings — totals and counts with conditions, date ranges, lookups, splitting text, distinct counts, running totals, share of a total, joining text. It is keyword matching, not comprehension. When the wording does not line up, it says so and shows templates instead of inventing a formula.
Breakdown
Call tree
The same formula, laid out
Every argument, named
What could bite you
Excel against Google Sheets
What this does, and where it stops
The left panel is a parser. It splits the formula into tokens, builds the call tree, and matches each function against a table of about ninety signatures, so every argument gets its real name rather than a position number. Text in quotes, absolute and relative references, sheet-qualified ranges, typed-in arrays and both argument separators are handled. Nothing is evaluated and no workbook is read, so the breakdown describes the shape of the formula, never its result.
Why the separator matters
Excel writes arguments apart with whatever the regional settings say. English installs use a comma; German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italian ones use a semicolon, and in those the decimal point becomes a comma as well. A formula copied from a blog into the wrong locale therefore breaks on the separator, not on the logic. The parser detects which one is in use and shows the formula rewritten with the other.
The trap checks are shape checks
A three-argument VLOOKUP, a hard-coded column index, a criteria range with no dollar signs, a whole-column reference, a volatile function, five levels of nesting: each of these is visible in the text of a formula without knowing anything about the data. That is what gets flagged. Whether the formula answers the question you actually had is not visible in the text, and this page does not pretend to judge it. Check two or three rows by hand against a filtered view before you trust any total.
The sentence direction is deliberately narrow
Turning arbitrary English into a formula needs a language model. What runs here instead is an intent matcher over a list of calculations people ask for repeatedly, with the ranges pulled out of your sentence by pattern. When it matches, you get a formula with every argument explained. When it does not, you get a plain statement that it did not match and a set of templates with the gaps left visible as placeholders. A formula that looks plausible and quietly sums the wrong column costs more time than no formula at all, so nothing is filled in by guesswork.
Version differences are named, not papered over
XLOOKUP, FILTER, UNIQUE, SORT, TEXTSPLIT and LET arrived with Excel 365 and Excel 2021; TEXTJOIN, IFS, MAXIFS and CONCAT with Excel 2019. QUERY, ARRAYFORMULA, SPLIT and the REGEX functions exist only in Google Sheets, and some of them have no Excel counterpart at all. The comparison table lists what each function in your formula needs, with the difference spelled out rather than a rewrite you would have to check anyway.