I didn't know these either and they seem like bolted on instead of properly integrated. Excel should overload the same operators to be able to write =A1A2 for example. But that being said it seems clumsy but workable. It does have a full set of math functions. For your example you can just do =improduct(A1,2) and it works. And that's just a slightly less convenient way of writing =A12. Certainly much better than having two cells per number?