Welcome to Excelling with Excel

The Basics

From this point on, you will find that the left hand side navigation lists the topics you will be covering in the main category. Example: The Basics is the main category and the topics Opening Excel, Moving through Excel, etc. are listed underneath.

If you wish to move into other areas, there is a navigation bar at the bottom of each page.

Opening Excel

There are two ways to open Excel:

• Using the Start menu, select Excel OR use the Start Menu to open all programs and select Excel from the list of programs presented
• Use the office toolbar, usually found at the top of your desktop screen and click on the icon that has a green border and an X shape inside the green border - this is the most common way to open Excel

The Opening Screen

When you open Excel, you see the following elements:

• a blue bar at the top - this is called the title bar and shows you what program you are in. (If you are in Excel it will say Microsoft Excel)
• the menu bar - this is where you see words like File, Edit, View etc
• under the menu bar is the standard toolbar you will use when working with Excel. This is where you see the icons for various operations you can do. Example: where you see the picture of a printer, when you select that icon, the document will print.
• and, lastly Excel always opens with cell A1 selected. You can tell that by looking under the standard toolbar for the A1. A1 or any combination of letter and number that appears there is called the cell address.
• NOTE: where you see the equals sign (=) and a blank area, that is where formulas will appear
  
  

When Excel opens you see a spreadsheet with columns (letters) and rows (numbers)

• You also see the words Book1 in the title bar. Book1 indicates that this is a workbook.
• You can change the name of the workbook by going to File Menu and selecting Save or Save As and then name the workbook.
• TIP: always name your workbooks so you know what type of information is in the workbook.

Now, look at the bottom part of your screen

A workbook is divided into sheets, Sheet1, Sheet2, etc.

You can change the name of the sheet by either right clicking on the words Sheet1 and selecting rename OR by double clicking on the words Sheet1 and typing in the name of the worksheet.

TIP: learn to name your worksheets. What if you had 10 worksheets with no names, but information on each one - how would you know what was on the worksheet without a name?

Look to the very right and to the bottom of the worksheet for the scrollbars

• There are two sets of scrollbars in Excel
• The one at at the bottom of the sheet moves horizontally
• The one on the right side of the sheet moves vertically
• You can move quickly with the scrollbars if you select the scrollbar arrowhead, click on the arrowhead and hold the click.