Welcome to Excelling with Excel

Saving
There are three assignments after you complete this entire lesson on saving and three things to know. These will be your first projects. And, when you finish you are ready for the next main topic MORE BASICS.

To save your document: FILE MENU-CLOSE or FILE MENU-EXIT. Both will ask you if you want to save the document. The answer is yes.

You will be given an opportunity to give the workbook a name at this point. Remember, one of the important things we do is to give our workbooks a name so we know what they are about.

NOTE: Excel ending suffix is .xls which means your spreadsheet when it is saved would look like this: budget.xls

SAVE AS - what is it and what does it do?
The best example is:

you have created a wonderful spreadsheet on John Smith's budget. You have saved the spreadsheet as johnSmith.xls. Now, you want to use the same Excel document, but want to to do a budget for Tom Jones based on John's budget. This is where you use SAVE AS. The steps:

1. Open up your document
2. Immediately, FILE MENU-SAVE AS
3. Give the document a new name - in this case it could be TomJones.xls
4. Look at the top of your screen - in the blue line area - you will see the name Tom Jones
5. Now, make any changes you want to the data
6. When you are done, just close the file
7. What you did - you created another spreadsheet from an original spreadsheet AND by using SAVE AS your original spreadsheet stays as it was which means you still have the johnsmith document and now you have the tomjones document.

Three things to know!
There are three assignments after you complete this entire lesson on saving and three things to know. These will be your first projects.

• changing column width
• knowing when the cell is too small for the numbers
• AutoFill
• show me a picture of all this

Changing column width

• take your mouse cursor (usually it is a "fat" plus sign on the actual worksheet space) and place the cursor between two column lines - say the line between column A and column B
• the cursor becomes an arrowhead
• click, hold the click and drag to the right
• your column should change in width

Knowing when a cell or column is too small for the number that wants to go in there

• #### or 1 5E+08 are the two signs Excel gives you to say "HELP" the cell or column is too small for the number you want me to put in the cell
• you will see #### more often
• how to fix - change the width of the column

AutoFill - the biggie!

• you will use autofill extensively in Excel
• what does autofill do - it will fill in cells with totals, months and quarters (quarter 1, quarter 2 etc.) and more

How to do Autofill

• open a workbook and type Jan (for January) in cell A1
• click on cell A1 and look very closely at the lower right hand corner
• there is a little square there
• click on the square, hold that click and drag to the right
• if you did it right, Jan, Feb, Mar etc. will appear in the cells automatically
• NOW, in the same spreadsheet go to cell A5 and enter the data you see below:
  123 tab, 456 tab, 789 (you should have 123 in cell A5, 456 in Cell B5 and 789 in cell C5)
• You should now be ready to enter this data starting in cell A6 and ending with cell C6: 678, 456, 328
• Now enter this data starting in cell A7 and ending with cell C7: 123, 876, 734
• Go carefully now, we want a total in cell A8. So, click on cell A8 and select the autosum icon
• Excel will show you the formula in the formula bar and also have dotted lines around the cells it thinks you want to add
• if you are happy, tap the enter key
• HERE comes the magic with autofill - you are going to complete all the totals across by using autofill
• select the cell A8, look to the lower right corner for that little box
• click, hold and drag
• MAGIC, autofill completed the sums

You should be so good now, you are ready for the first Excel assignments.

AND, you are ready to move on to the next main topic More Basics