Getting Started


At first glance, Excel can seem pretty intimidating, especially if you ve never worked with a spreadsheet program before. But like most software programs, Excel becomes quite simple if you learn it in manageable chunks .

Starting Excel and Exploring the Workspace

Let s fire up Excel and take a quick look around before we start entering data. Follow these steps:

  1. Click the Start button at the left end of the Windows taskbar, click All Programs , and then click Microsoft Excel .

    Excel 2002 starts, displaying the New Workbook task pane on the right side of the program window.

  2. If necessary, hide the Office Assistant and maximize the window.

    Your screen looks something like the one shown here:

    click to expand

    Taking up the majority of the screen is a blank worksheet, which is laid out in a grid of columns and rows. There are 256 columns , lettered A through IV, and 65,536 rows, numbered 1 through 65,536. The rectangle at the junction of each column and row is called a cell . To identify each of the more than 16 million cells on the worksheet, Excel uses an address, or reference , that consists of the letter at the top of the cell s column and the number at the left end of its row. For example, the reference of the cell in the upper-left corner of the worksheet is A1. The active cell ”the one you re working with ”is designated on the worksheet by a heavy border. Excel displays the cell reference of the active cell in the name box at the left end of the formula bar . At the bottom of the window, the status bar displays useful information, including the AutoCalculate area, where Excel displays the sum of entries in selected cells.

    The worksheet on the screen is just one sheet in the current file, which is called a workbook . By default, each new workbook contains three sheets named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. However, a single workbook can contain as many sheets as your computer s memory can hold. You can have several types of sheets in one workbook, including worksheets, chart sheets (where you can create graphs of your data), and macro sheets (which store automated ways of manipulating the data or the workbook). This workbook format enables you to store related data on separate sheets but in a single file.

    For each sheet in a workbook, Excel displays a tab , like a file folder tab, above the status bar at the bottom of the screen. You move from one sheet to another by clicking a tab:

  3. At the bottom of the Excel window, click the Sheet2 tab.

    Excel displays the blank Sheet2 as the active worksheet, just as if you had turned the page in a book.

  4. Click the Sheet3 tab to display another blank worksheet, and then finish by clicking the Sheet1 tab.

Information about  

Chart sheets, page 151

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When you need more sheets

If you need to add sheets to a workbook, click Worksheet on the Insert menu. Excel inserts a new sheet to the left of the active sheet and makes the new sheet active. If you frequently create workbooks with more than three sheets, you can change this default number by clicking Options on the Tools menu and increasing the Sheets in new workbook setting on the General tab.

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Saving a Workbook

Although you haven t entered any data in your workbook yet, let s go ahead and save it so you can see that saving workbooks is just like saving other Office files.

  1. Click the Save button.

    Because you have not yet assigned the workbook a name, Excel displays the Save As dialog box.

  2. Be sure that the My Documents folder appears in the Save In box, and then in the File Name box, type 2002 Jobs as the name of the file.

  3. Leave the other settings as they are for now, and click Save to save the notebook.

    From now on, you can save this workbook by simply clicking the Save button.

  4. Before moving on, close the New Workbook task pane.

Information about  

Saving documents, page 16




Online Traning Solutions - Quick Course in Microsoft Office XP
Online Traning Solutions - Quick Course in Microsoft Office XP
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 116

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