Step 1 Add together the area of each side to get the surface area of the box. One side is the height of the can the other side is the perimeter of the circle since the label wraps once around the can. Formula to calculate the surface area of a rectangle.
S tot total surface area.
Multiply the length by the length itself. Given height h and edge length a the surface area can be calculated using the following equations. Surface area is the total area of each side1 X Research source As long as you know how to find the area of a regular rectangle which is simply the length times the height you can find each side and add them together. We can see from the net that there are two rectangles with dimensions 3 cm by 6 cm two rectangles with dimensions 2 cm by 6 cm and two rectangles with dimensions 2 cm by 3 cm.