Introduction

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 is a spreadsheet program that you can use to track and analyze sales, create budgets , and organize finances ”both business and personal. You can also use Excel to manage inventory, setup investment reports or create loan amortizations. Microsoft Excel is a financial tool for performing calculations and other tasks automatically, which allows you to accomplish a variety of business or personal tasks in a fraction of the time it would take using pen and paper.

This chapter introduces you to the terminology and the basic Excel skills you can will in the program. In Excel, files are called workbooks . Each new workbook contains a default setting (which you can change) of three worksheets , which are similar to the pages in an accountant 's ledger. You can format the worksheets for your specific project at hand, or you can download pre-made templates from Microsoft's Web site.

You navigate through various tasks with a click of the mouse, or by using short-cut keys on your keyboard. Microsoft Excel is set up with a variety of menus and dialog boxes that assist you in getting the job done right. Toolbars help you when you need to quickly perform a task, such as formatting text. When working with your worksheets, you can view more than one, or resize the window to compare data.

The Office Assistant, along with Excel's extensive on-line Help, can point you in the right direction. When you finish the design of your worksheet you can save it in various formats, a Web page for example, to use in another office program. Should something happen to your workbook or worksheets, Excel has a recovery feature designed to help recover your worksheet.