Tutorials References Exercises Videos Menu
Create Website Get Certified Upgrade

Excel Tutorial

Excel HOME Excel Introduction Excel Get Started Excel Overview Excel Syntax Excel Ranges Excel Fill Excel Move Cells Excel Add Cells Excel Delete Cells Excel Undo Redo Excel Formulas Excel Relative Reference Excel Absolute Reference Excel Arithmetic Operators Excel Parentheses Excel Functions

Excel Formatting

Excel Formatting Excel Format Painter Excel Format Colors Excel Format Fonts Excel Format Borders Excel Format Numbers Excel Format Grids Excel Format Settings

Excel Data Analysis

Excel Sort Excel Filter Excel Tables Excel Conditional Format Excel Highlight Cell Rules Excel Top Bottom Rules Excel Data Bars Excel Color Scales Excel Icon Sets Excel Manage Rules (CF) Excel Charts

Table Pivot

Table Pivot Intro

Excel Case

Case: Poke Mart Case: Poke Mart, Styling

Excel Functions

AND AVERAGE AVERAGEIF AVERAGEIFS CONCAT COUNT COUNTA COUNTBLANK COUNTIF COUNTIFS IF IFS LEFT LOWER MAX MEDIAN MIN MODE NPV OR RAND RIGHT STDEV.P STDEV.S SUM SUMIF SUMIFS TRIM VLOOKUP XOR

Excel How To

Convert Time to Seconds Difference Between Times NPV (Net Present Value) Remove Duplicates

Guided Projects

Introduction to Excel Learn Data Calculations Learn Data Visualization Learn to Create a Budget Learn to Create a Timeline Learn to Style in Excel

Excel Examples

Excel Exercises Excel Certificate

Excel References

Excel Keyboard Shortcuts


Excel Overview


Overview

This chapter is about giving you an overview of Excel. Excel's structure is made of two pieces, the Ribbon and the Sheet.

Have a look at the picture below. The Ribbon is marked with a red rectangle and the Sheet is marked with a yellow rectangle:

First, let's start with explaining the Ribbon.


The Ribbon explained

The Ribbon provides shortcuts to Excel commands. A command is an action that allows you to make something happen. This can for example be to: insert a table, change the font size, or to change the color of a cell.

The Ribbon may look crowded and hard to understand at first. Don't be scared, It will become easier to navigate and use as you learn more. Most of the time we tend to use the same functionalities over again.

The Ribbon is made up by the App launcher, Tabs, Groups and Commands. In this section we will explain the different parts of the Ribbon.

App launcher

The App launcher icon has nine dots and is called the Office 365 navigation bar. It allows you to access the different parts of the Office 365 suite, such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. App launcher can be used to switch seamlessly between the Office 365 applications.

Tabs

The tab is a menu with sub divisions sorted into groups. The tabs allow users to quickly navigate between options of menus which display different groups of functionality.

Groups

The groups are sets of related commands. The groups are separated by the thin vertical line break.

Commands

The commands are the buttons that you use to do actions.

Now, let's have a look at the Sheet. Soon you will be able to understand the relationship between the Ribbon and the Sheet, and you can make things happen.


The Sheet explained

The Sheet is a set of rows and columns. It forms the same pattern as we have in math exercise books, the rectangle boxes formed by the pattern are called cells.

Values can be typed to cells.

Values can be both numbers and letters:

Copy Values

Each cell has its unique reference, which is its coordinates, this is where the columns and rows intersect.

Let's break this up and explain by an example

Have a look at the picture below. Hello world was typed in cell C4. The reference can be found by clicking on the relevant cell and seeing the reference in the Name Box to the left, which tells you that the cell's reference is C4.

Another way to find the reference is to first find the column, in this case C, then map that towards the row, in this case 4, which gives us the reference of C4.

Note: The reference of the cell is its coordinates. For example, C4 has the coordinates of column C and row 4. You find the cell in the intersection of the two. The letter is always the column and the number is always the row.



Multiple Sheets

You start with one Sheet by default when you create a new workbook. You can have many sheets in a workbook. New sheets can be added and removed. Sheets can be named to making it easier to work with data sets.

Are you up for the challenge? Let's create two new sheets and give them useful names.

First, click the plus icon, shown in the picture below, create two new sheets:

Tip: You can use the hotkey Shift + F11 to create new sheets. Try it!

Second, right click with your mouse on the relevant sheet and click rename:

Third, enter useful names for the three sheets:

In this example we used the names Data Visualization, Data Structure and Raw Data. This is a typical structure when you are working with data.

Good job! You have now created your first workbook with three named sheets!


Chapter Summary

The workbook has two main components: the Ribbon and the Sheet.

The Ribbon is used to navigate and access commands.

The Sheet is made up of columns and rows, which make cells.

Each cell has its unique reference. You can add new sheets to your workbook and name them.

In the next chapters you will learn more about the sheet, formulas, ranges and functions.