Excel Basics

When you first start Excel, the New Workbook task pane also appears on the right side of the workspace, enabling you to open an existing workbook, or start a new one from scratch, or from a template (see Figure 7-1). You can close the task pane to give yourself more room on the screen by clicking the Close box in the upper right corner of the task pane.

Figure 7-1: The Excel window provides the workspace for your worksheets and data lists.

The grid in the center of the workspace is the worksheet on which you ll do all your calculating tasks in Excel. Along the bottom and right sides of the worksheet area are two scroll bars ”one vertical and one horizontal. You will use these to scroll to different areas of your worksheet when it gets too large to display on one screen.

At the bottom of the left side of the work area, you see the worksheet tabs, which enable you to move from sheet to sheet when you have created more than one worksheet in your Excel workbook. To move to a different worksheet, simply click the worksheet tab of the sheet you want to view. In addition, you can rename worksheets by right-clicking the tab to display a shorcut menu.

Lingo  

A workbook in Excel is a collection of worksheets organized by a common topic or function.