Excel: Introduction to Spreadsheets

This is the start of a four-part introduction to Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program.

In this course, Excel plays a prominent role.

That may surprise you if you never have heard of spreadsheet programs before.  If so, you are likely to wonder why you're learning about them here.  

I'm going to use this short introduction to give you a few examples and to preview what's ahead.

General Orientation to Excel

Excel is considered to be one of the primary three programs of Microsoft Office.

Like Word and PowerPoint, Excel shares the same interface.  Much of what you need to learn about using Excel you already know.

Why Use Excel?

Excel is a very general tool.  It isn't easy to tell you all the things that you can do with it since people keep coming up with new applications.

In general, however, Excel is a good tool with which to collect and store information.  You'll see that Excel has a logical structure, we call it a "spreadsheet," for holding different kinds of information.  There are tools that even simplify typing your information into the spreadsheet.

Once you've collected your information, you have powerful tools to help you organize it.

Sometimes you need to perform calculations to understand what is in your spreadsheet.  Excel is well equipped to do mathematical and statistical calculations.

Finally, Excel has tools that let you present your information in a variety of ways that are visually interesting.  These include charts and graphs.

That may seem like a lot of power.  However, it only hints at the things that Excel can do.

Our examination of Excel is divided into four parts.  I'll go through each of these parts now as a preview. 

Part 1: Building Spreadsheets

In the first part we'll look at spreadsheets as a grid structure into which which we put things.  This is a very neat arrangement and fits the logic of entering information for most projects.

There are other ways, besides spreadsheets, to collect data in a similar appearing grid structure.  For example, you can put your information into a table in Microsoft Word.

What sets Excel apart is all the useful things you can do once you get your information into an Excel spreadsheet.

Good Looking Spreadsheets

You can organize and present your spreadsheet attractively.  You have a lot of formatting options, some of which can be applied automatically.

If you need to present information, Excel will give you the power you need.

Printing

Organizing your information and looking at it on the screen is only one aspect to building good looking spreadsheets.

You often have to print your spreadsheet so that it can be distributed or for it to become a permanent record.

Excel adds formatting power that is associated with printing, such as adding headers and footers to the pages.

Part 2: Manipulating Spreadsheets

The second part of our Excel study involves ways that we manipulate spreadsheets.

There are two basic things that we'll emphasize here: modifying the order of the rows or columns of the spreadsheet and adding new information by doing calculations using information in the spreadsheet.

Handling Lists

You might have guessed already that a spreadsheet is a great way to keep lists of things.  That's true and it is likely to be the primary use for Excel spreadsheets.

One thing that makes lists useful is being able to change their order.  For example, you can alphabetize a list of people and their addresses.  Sometimes you want people arranged by their last name, other times by their nickname.  No problem with Excel.

A list of class assignment might have been entered in order of which courses with which they are associated.  That may be useful sometimes, but you may also want a list that is arranged in order of the due dates for the assignments, too.

You can keep track of the courses that you've taken so you can monitor your academic progress.  Type in your courses each semester, then resort them so that they are arranged by department.

Finally, you can sort a list of events by data to keep track of your master schedule.

These are just a few examples of how lists can be manipulated to make them more useful.  Just writing your list on a piece of paper doesn't give you this power. 

Functions

The Excel functions let you do calculations.  This is a powerful "calculator-type" power.

Look at the list here and you'll see that you have a variety of types of calculations, ranging from simple counting the number of items in a list to performing statistical calculations.

With this power, who needs to buy a calculator?

But there is more.

Functions

Functions let you handle information in complex ways.  Combine the concept of a list, ways to divide the information into sets and the application of a variety of calculations and you begin to get the hint of Excel's power.

This is problem solving.