Microsoft Excel: Excel Basics

Excel shares an overall interface with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

The Same Interface

Sharing an interface means that you are already familiar with the overall operation of the menu bar and many of the tools on the tool bar.

What it Does

Excel differs from the other Microsoft programs in what it does.

We saw some of the things that Excel does in the preview.

Let's look at this list for a review.

You should now be thinking of Excel as a tool to store information and format it so that it looks good.

Excel is also a general purpose calculator that handles all your calculations on the fly.

Some of the Excel functions also let you make logical choices.  This means that what appears in your spreadsheet can depend on other information in the spreadsheet.  You'll see later how this is a very powerful tool.

You can sort your information and present it graphically.

Unfortunately, these are all abstract capabilities.

More Useful Things

What we need to do is start thinking about applications.  Then you'll see that keeping lists of things is a common task and one that is often faster are better inside a tool rich environment.

You'll see from the example later that the calculation model that you use with Excel is much better than using a calculator for most problems.  If you make a mistake entering a number in an Excel spreadsheet, you simply correct that number and your calculations are automatically updated.  With a calculator, you probably need to enter all your numbers again.

Moreover, in Excel, calculations can be based on previous calculations.  This can get very complex -- and useful.

Combine these two capabilities: lists and calculations.  You can do all the list oriented things (sorting, making good looking tables, etc.) and do calculations using this information.

To do all this, you need to see how Excel is organized and then how to enter your information into an Excel spreadsheet.

Getting Started with Excel

This is a general overview of the top left corner of an Excel spreadsheet.

Above the spreadsheet are the now familiar Microsoft Office title bar, menu bar, tool bar and even a format bar.

A Few New Things ...

The part of the screen that is unique to Excel appears below the familiar "bars."

There is a cell in the top left corner called the "name box."  This holds the address of the currently selected cell (or the upper left corner of a range of selected cells).

Next to this, on the same line, is the "formula bar."  The formula bar shows what is inside the currently selected cell.

You'll see how both these work in a minute.

... at the Bottom

When we go to the bottom of the screen, you see a row with the "worksheet scroll buttons," the "worksheet tabs" and the "horizontal scroll bar."

You'll see how these work, too, in a few minutes.

... and the "Worksheet"

Finally, the "worksheet" is located in the center of the screen where it dominates the view.

The worksheet is made up of a grid of cells.  At the top of this grid is the "column header."  The cells in the column header contain letters.  These letters are used to identify the columns.

On the left side is the "row header."  The rows are identified by whole numbers.

The worksheet cells are identified by combining the column letter and row number.  For example, the intersection of column A and row 1 is the worksheet cell A1.

We'll work a lot with these cell addresses.

First, we need to look at what we can put into the worksheet cells.

Some Basic Operations

We can type text into cells.  In this example, the text at the top -- which is used as labels -- is simply typed text.

You can type numbers into the cells.

And you can type math or arithmetic functions into the cells.

What I want you to note here is that you don't see the math or arithmetic function that was typed into the cell.  All you see on the worksheet is the result of applying the function.

This is an important concept: you see the results when you look at a worksheet.

Checking Things

If you want to see what was typed into a worksheet cell, then you need to select the cell in question by clicking on it.

In this case, cell E2 has been selected.  You can tell that in two ways.  The selected cell is highlighted and the address of the selected cell appears in the name box.

Look in the formula bar.  Instead of seeing the value 28 (which appears in the worksheet), you see the formula that was typed.  In this case, the formula says "add what is in cells B2, C2 and D2").   The result is placed in cell E2 because that is where this formula is located.