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Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application for Windows and Mac. Its features include powerful calculation tools and graphing capabilities. It has been the most widely used spreadsheet application since 1993.
Over the years Excel has become an integral part of the accounting functions of many businesses, but can used be anyone who needs to organise data or figures effectively. It provides an easy and effective way to format and manage data, giving the user the ability to create a chart or graph with ease. Understanding and being able to use Excel is now a basic necessity for many companies.
Excel can seem complicated and intimidating at first. The aim of the tutorial that follows is to guide you through the basics. You can follow each stage step by step, or dip in to particular sections to learn a specific tool.
For a really comprehensive coverage of Excel we’d recommend attending one of our instructor-led training courses which are delivered by experienced industry professionals.
The courses available include:
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
Start off by opening up Excel 2007 by double clicking on the icon, either on your desktop or via the Programs list from the Start menu in the bottom left of your screen. All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Course.
At the top of the Excel window is the title bar which will display the name of the workbook you are working on (Excel files are called Workbooks!). The default name for for a new Workbook is ” Book1″.
To the left of the Title Bar is the Quick Access Toolbar. This tool bar provides shortcuts to the most frequently selected tools. It looks like this:
If this is your first time using Excel then the bar will be set to its defaults: Save, Undo and Redo.
Undo will delete the action you have just taken and go back to what the situation was previously (useful if you make a mistake!)
Redo reverses the effects of pressing “undo” (if you decide it wasn’t a mistake after all!)
Save will initially prompt you to give your Workbook a name (something more exciting than Book 1!) and a location to save it in. After you’ve saved your Workbook for the first time, pressing “Save” again will save any updates you have made to the same file.
Located in the top left hand corner of the Excel Window is the Microsoft Office button. Click here to select from a variety of tasks from a drop-down menu including “Open”, “Save”, “Save As” etc… If you’ve worked with other Office product’s you’ll be familiar with these options.
In order to work well with Excel you have to give it the right instruction, and most of these are available on the ribbon. The ribbon is located below the Quick access toolbar across the top of the window. The ribbon is made up of lots of different tabs which display their corresponding command instructions when clicked. These tabs allow you to issue commands, access menus or access dialog boxes. There is also a “dialog box launcher” that, when clicked will offer additional commands that you may wish to use. Here is a picture of the Ribbon:
Excel Ribbon
Click image to view full size
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
Microsoft Excel Workbooks are made up of Spreadsheets. A Spreadsheet is organised into rows and columns of cells. The columns lettered and the rows are numbered. These numbers and letters combine to give each cell an address (e.g A1). All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course.
The contents of each cell can be entered via the formula bar. This is divided into two parts: the left side of the formula bar shows the cell address, and the right side shows the information that the cell is holding. If you can’t see the formula bar, select the “view” tab in the top menu and click the formula button in the show/hide section.
You can also see the total, mean, maximum or minimum of any numbers or cells by highlighting them and looking at your status bar. This is located at the very bottom of your excel window. If you wish you can also change the information the status bar gives by right clicking on the status bar and choosing its options in the Customize Status Bar Menu.
Excel Status Bar
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
The first thing that you will need to learn is how to move around a Spreadsheet. One way of doing this is to use the arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight a particular cell. The highlighted cell has a thicker black border than the others. Using the arrow keys you can move the selected cell up, down, left or right one cell at a time. You can also use the page up or page down keys to move a whole page at a time. All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Course.
It’s easy to lose track of where you are in a spreadsheet – at any time you can hold the “Ctrl” key the “Home” keys together to return the selected cell to the top left of the sheet (cell A1). If you are new at this then it is worthwhile practicing this for a few minutes before continuing so as to get a better feel for moving around.
For a quick and easy way to locate a cell press the F5 key. This will open the “go to” box, where in you can enter the address of the cell that you want to go to, and be taken there immediately. Alternatively, you may find it easier to use the left part of the Formula bar at the top of your spreadsheet. Just type the address of the cell (e.g A1 or C4 etc…) and press enter
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
In the last section we explored how to select one cell at a time, however there are times when you might want to select a group (or “range”) of cells together. All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to simply press and hold the left mouse button and then drag the curser over the area which you which to highlight.
The second way is to highlight one cell (for example A1), and then press the F8 button on your keyboard. When you have done this the “Extend Selection” notification will appear on you status bar. Now select the last cell you which to highlight by clicking on it with your left mouse button and the computer will then highlight all the cells in between those two points. For instance if you click on A1 then E13 then all the cells between those two rows and columns will now be selected. Try it now!
In order to highlight more than one seperate area at a time you can hold down “Ctrl” whilst using the dragging technique described earlier. Also if at anytime you want to completely clear your spreadsheet of all highlighted areas then press Esc.
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
OK – we now know how to highlight cells, but we still don’t have any data in them!
Cells can hold all sorts of data, including text, numbers and calculations.
In order to enter data into a cell, first select it. After you have highlighted the cell you want, you can add data to it either just by starting to type straight away, or by clicking the in to the right hand side of the formula bar and typing there:
To delete any unwanted or incorrect information simply press backspace. If you highlight a cell that already has data in it and start typing, the original data will be wiped. If you want to edit the data that is already in the cell, highlight that cell and press F2.
After you are satisfied that you have put what you want to in the cell, press enter to finish or if you prefer use the directional key buttons or mouse to move to another cell or area.
All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Course.
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
The cells in a spreadsheet are quite small, so typing in a lot of information can lead to it overlapping and covering up other cells. One method for confining lots of information to just one cell block is text wrapping.
Try this out by typing a lot of text in to a cell so that is overlaps the edge. Next, select the cell by clicking on it, and then click on the Wrap text button in the ribbon above. After you have done this the text should be confined to the vertical cell borders, as seen below:
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
If at any time when you are using Microsoft Excel you wish to save your work and quit, a simple and effective way of doing this is to press the close or “X” button at the top right hand corner of the program screen. When this is pressed Excel will automatically ask whether or not you wish to save your progress – simply select “Yes” to save your work and close Excel
You can also save your work without shutting Excel entirely, which is useful for saving your work as you go along. To do this, click the Microsoft Office Button at the top left of your screen and select the “Save” or Save As” option.
The “Save” option will save any updates you have made to the current workbook in the location where it is already saved. If you have not saved the workbook somewhere already, Excel will ask you to give it a name and ask you where you want to save it (e.g. on your Desktop, or in My Documents). After you’ve given your workbook a name and a location once, pressing the “Save” button again will simply save the changes to the same file. A quick way of doing this is to press “Ctrl” & “S” keys together.
If you chose to “Save As”, you will be able to save a copy of the file in a different location with a new name, without overwriting the original. Only use “Save As” if you want to save a copy of the file with another name (for instance if you want to make a backup of the file in its current state before you make changes to it). If you just need to save the changes to the same file, use “Save” to avoid ending up with multiple copies!
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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel 2007 Tutorial on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »
