Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated October 19, 2024)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Excel in Microsoft 365, and 2021
Bailey noticed that Excel has a function called POWER to raise values to a desired power. She has always used the exponentiation operator (the carat) for this purpose, so she wonders if there is anything that the POWER function does that she cannot do with exponentiation.
Excel often provides different ways to the same task. This seems to be one of those instances, as there is no difference that we could find between using POWER and the exponentiation operator. For instance, both of the following produce an identical result:
=POWER(5,7) =5^7
In both notations, the first number (5) is raised to the second number (7), meaning that 5 is multiplied by itself 7 times. It is essentially a much shorter version of this:
=5*5*5*5*5*5*5
For my usage, I prefer using the exponentiation operator instead of the POWER function; it just "feels right" to me. There is one instance in which you may find using POWER a bit clearer, however, and that is when you are raising a number to a fractional value. Both of the following are equivalent:
=POWER(27,1/3) =27^(1/3)
If you forget to use the parentheses with the exponentiation operator—which I find easy to do—you won't get the answer you expect. So, in this case, it may be clearer to use POWER.
The bottom line is that you can use whichever notation seems easiest to you, as both do the same thing.
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