After the new LAMBDA function was released in Excel early December 2020 and playing around a little bit with that function and its recursive features, I quickly asked myself: would it be possible to perform calculations with large numbers in Excel by only using formulas?
Now, some weeks later, I can say: yes, that’s possible! I started with some array and text functions as helper functions and then implemented LNUM.SUM for adding large numbers in Excel. After that, I created the function LNUM.SUBTRACT to be able to subtract two large numbers. And I finally implemented LNUM.PRODUCT for multiplying two larger numbers, which then uses LNUM.SUM and LNUM.SUBTRACT.
I wrote an article about each function in this blog, where I presented my formulas. However, I am mainly blogging in German. Online translators are not able to translate Excel formulas correctly and as my audience lastly increased by many English-speaking readers, I thought to write this article in English and summarize the German articles about my LAMBDAs for large numbers. The following sections about my functions are not so much detailed as the articles in German, but I hope, they will provide the basic understandings.