Chapter 1: Excel Basics
Excel is one of several spreadsheet applications available today, but it’s the one you’re most likely to be familiar with—and for good reason: It’s the best. Microsoft first introduced Excel for the Mac in 1985, and it made its way to the PC 2 years later, so it’s been around for over 30 years. Excel is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful tools in the Microsoft Office suite. An estimated 800 million plus people use Excel, making it the most used single piece of software in the world.
Whether you want to use Excel as an integral part of managing your business—such as for accounting, employee scheduling, maintaining customer lists, or sales reporting—or are just get started with it, this book will prepare you to tackle Excel on your own. In addition to learning about the basic elements of Excel, you’ll be privy to a number of tips and tricks that will make your everyday use more efficient. This helpful guide to Excel walks through everything from how to set up Excel’s default settings the way you want them, to how to enter formulas, to how to create PivotTables.
Understanding Spreadsheets and Spreadsheet Terminology
A spreadsheet is basically a big piece of digital graph paper that can perform calculations. It’s a two-dimensional grid of rows and columns that converge to create individual cells capable of housing data and performing calculations. Columns, which are ordered from left to right, have column headers labeled alphabetically from A to XFD. Rows, which are ordered from top to bottom, have row headers labeled numerically from 1 to 1,048,576. Since 2007, Excel has allowed more than 16,000 columns and more than 1 million rows, which means there are more than 16 billion individual cells on a single spreadsheet in which you can enter data or formulas!
The active cell is the cell where you have your cursor at any given moment. The intersection of the column and row headers at the active cell makes up the cell address. For instance, D3 refers to the cell at column D, row 3. The active workbook is the workbook you are working in at the moment; you can have multiple workbooks open at any time, but you can work in only one at a time.
In Excel, an individual spreadsheet page is referred to as a worksheet. Some people tend to use the terms spreadsheet and worksheet interchangeably; while this wording is acceptable, technically it isn’t accurate. Spreadsheet refers to the broader scope of any digital spreadsheet application. A worksheet can also be called a sheet or a tab. A workbook is a collection of worksheets, and while a workbook can contain only one worksheet, it must contain at least one. Think of a workbook as a book on your desk and worksheets as the individual pages that are between the covers.
Note: Excel doesn’t limit the number of worksheets a workbook can hold. The only limitation is imposed by your available system memory.
There are two distinct layers to any worksheet: The worksheet layer holds those billions of cells, and an invisible layer above the worksheet layer holds any objects that you insert, such as graphics, charts, and Sm...