Chapter 43. Learning About Excel Workbooks

This chapter introduces you to Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program. Excel is to numbers what Word is to text; Excel has been called a word processor for numbers . With Excel, you can create numerically based proposals, business plans, business forms, accounting worksheets, and virtually any other document that contains calculated numbers.

If you are new to electronic worksheets, you will probably have to take more time to learn Excel's environment than you had to learn Word's. Excel starts with a grid of cells in which you place information. This chapter takes things slowly to acquaint you with Excel and explains the background necessary for understanding how an Excel working area operates. This chapter gives you a broad Excel overview while subsequent chapters return to some of this chapter's features in more depth and cover additional skills you will need to know to use Excel effectively.