Information Technology

Introduction to Microsoft Excel

Topics:
 Identifying the Elements in a workbook
 Arithmetic Calculations

What is Microsoft Excel?

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program used to record and analyze numerical and statistical
data. Microsoft Excel provides multiple features to perform various operations like calculations,
pivot tables, graph tools, macro programming, etc. It is compatible with multiple OS like
Windows, macOS, Android and iOS.

A Excel spreadsheet can be understood as a collection of columns and rows that form a table.
Alphabetical letters are usually assigned to columns, and numbers are usually assigned to rows.
The point where a column and a row meet is called a cell. The address of a cell is given by the
letter representing the column and the number representing a row.

Why Should I Learn Microsoft Excel?

We all deal with numbers in one way or the other. We all have daily expenses which we pay for
from the monthly income that we earn. For one to spend wisely, they will need to know their
income vs. expenditure. Microsoft Excel comes in handy when we want to record, analyze and
store such numeric data. Let's illustrate this using the following image.
How to Open Microsoft Excel?
Running Excel is not different from running any other Windows program. If you are running
Windows with a GUI like (Windows XP, Vista, and 7) follow the following steps.

 Click on start menu

 Point to all programs
 Point to Microsoft Excel
 Click on Microsoft Excel

Alternatively, you can also open it from the start menu if it has been added there. You can also
open it from the desktop shortcut if you have created one.

Understanding the Ribbon

The ribbon provides shortcuts to commands in Excel. A command is an action that the user
performs. An example of a command is creating a new document, printing a documenting, etc.
The image below shows the ribbon used in Excel 2013.
Ribbon components explained

Ribbon start button - it is used to access commands i.e. creating new documents, saving
existing work, printing, accessing the options for customizing Excel, etc.

Ribbon tabs – the tabs are used to group similar commands together. The home tab is used for
basic commands such as formatting the data to make it more presentable, sorting and finding
specific data within the spreadsheet.

Ribbon bar – the bars are used to group similar commands together. As an example, the
Alignment ribbon bar is used to group all the commands that are used to align data together.

Understanding the worksheet (Rows and Columns, Sheets, Workbooks)

A worksheet is a collection of rows and columns. When a row and a column meet, they form a
cell. Cells are used to record data. Each cell is uniquely identified using a cell address. Columns
are usually labelled with letters while rows are usually numbers.

A workbook is a collection of worksheets. By default, a workbook has three cells in Excel.

You can delete or add more sheets to suit your requirements. By default, the sheets are named
Sheet1, Sheet2 and so on and so forth. You can rename the sheet names to more meaningful
names i.e. Daily Expenses, Monthly Budget, etc.

Customization Microsoft Excel Environment

Personally I like the black colour, so my excel theme looks blackish. Your favourite colour could
be blue, and you too can make your theme colour look blue-like. If you are not a programmer,
you may not want to include ribbon tabs i.e. developer. All this is made possible via
customizations. In this sub-section, we are going to look at;

 Customization the ribbon

 Setting the colour theme
 Settings for formulas
 Proofing settings
 Save settings

Customization of ribbon
The above image shows the default ribbon in Excel 2013. Let's start with customization the
ribbon, suppose you do not wish to see some of the tabs on the ribbon, or you would like to add
some tabs that are missing such as the developer tab. You can use the options window to achieve
this.

 Click on the ribbon start button

 Select options from the drop down menu. You should be able to see an Excel Options
dialog window
 Select the customize ribbon option from the left-hand side panel as shown below

 On your right-hand side, remove the check marks from the tabs that you do not wish to
see on the ribbon. For this example, we have removed Page Layout, Review, and View
tab.
 Click on the "OK" button when you are done.

Your ribbon will look as follows

Important Excel shortcuts
Ctrl + P used to open the print dialogue window

Ctrl + N creates a new workbook

Ctrl + S saves the current workbook

Ctrl + C copy contents of current select

Ctrl + V paste data from the clipboard

SHIFT + F3 displays the function insert dialog window

SHIFT + F11 Creates a new worksheet

F2 Check formula and cell range covered

Best Practices when working with Microsoft Excel

1. Save workbooks with backward compatibility in mind. If you are not using the latest
features in higher versions of Excel, you should save your files in 2003 *.xls format for
backwards compatibility
2. Use description names for columns and worksheets in a workbook
3. Avoid working with complex formulas with many variables. Try to break them down
into small managed results that you can use to build on
4. Use built-in functions whenever you can instead of writing your own formulas

Types of operators. There are four different types of calculation

operators: arithmetic, comparison, text concatenation, and reference.

 Arithmetic operators
 To perform basic mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication,
or division; combine numbers; and produce numeric results, use the following arithmetic
operators.

Arithmetic operator Meaning Example

+ (plus sign) Addition =3+3
– (minus sign) Subtraction =3–3
Negation =-3
* (asterisk) Multiplication =3*3
/ (forward slash) Division =3/3
% (percent sign) Percent 30%
^ (caret) Exponentiation =3^3

 Comparison operators

You can compare two values with the following operators. When two values are
compared by using these operators, the result is a logical value—either TRUE or FALSE.

Comparison operator Meaning Example

= (equal sign) Equal to =A1=B1
> (greater than sign) Greater than =A1>B1
< (less than sign) Less than =A1<B1
>= (greater than or equal to sign) Greater than or equal to =A1>=B
1
<= (less than or equal to sign) Less than or equal to =A1<=B
1
<> (not equal to sign) Not equal to =A1<>B
1

 Text concatenation operator

Use the ampersand (&) to concatenate (join) one or more text strings to produce a single
piece of text.

Text operator Meaning Example

& Connects, or ="North"&"wind" results in
(ampersand) concatenates, two values "Northwind".
to produce one Where A1 holds "Last name"
continuous text value and B1 holds "First name",
=A1&", "&B1 results in "Last
 Text operator Meaning Example
name, First name".

 Reference operators

Combine ranges of cells for calculations with the following operators.

Reference Meaning Example

operator
: (colon) Range operator, which produces one B5:B15
reference to all the cells between two
references, including the two
references.
, (comma) Union operator, which combines =SUM(B5:B15,D5:D1
multiple references into one reference 5)
(space) Intersection operator, which produces B7:D7 C6:C8
one reference to cells common to the
two references

How to Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide in Excel

Open Excel. You will get a window similar to the one shown below. The outlook of Excel will
depend on your version.
  Enter the data in your worksheet as shown in the image above.
 We will now perform the calculations using the respective arithmetic operators. When
performing calculations in Excel, you should always start with the equal (=) sign.
 Let's start with the one for addition. Write the following formula in E2 Excel (Result
column)
 =C2+D2

HERE,

 "=" tells Excel to evaluate whatever follows after the equal sign
 "C2" is the cell address of the first number given by C representing the column letter and
2 representing the row number
 "D2" is the cell address of the second number given by D representing the column letter
and 2 representing the row number

Press enter key on the keyboard when done. You should get 16 as the result.

Formatting data in Microsoft Excel

We all love beautiful things don't we? Formatting in Excel helps us achieve exactly that. We can
make our spreadsheets more presentable. We will use the data in the arithmetic operations table.
We will make the column names;

 Bold
 Align serial numbers to the left
 Enclose the data in boxes.

Make column names bold

 Highlight the cells that have the column names by dragging them.
 Click on the bold button represented by B command.
 Your workbook should now appear as follows
Align data to the left

 We will align the serial numbers to the left

 Highlight all the data in the S/N column
 Click on align left as shown below

Enclose data in boxes

Highlight all the columns and rows with data

On the font ribbon bar, click on borders command as shown below.

You will get the following drop down menu

Select the option "All Borders".

Your data should now look as follows

Setting the print area and printing (Print View) & Page Layout

The print area is the part of the worksheet that you would like to print out on paper. The quick
and easy way of doing it is by using the following shortcut commands

Ctrl + P

You will get the following print preview.

Press Esc button to exit print preview mode