Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful spreadsheet applications. It is a powerful program because of its uses like to manage data, perform mathematical operations, create charts, balance a checkbook, create an expense report, build formulas, and perform analysis of variance (ANOVA), correlation, regression, T-test and other statistical Analysis.

Getting Started with Microsoft Excel

The first step in learning Microsoft Excel like any other computer program is familiarizing yourself with its "User Interface and Tools". You will then need to most importantly, know, practice and use of its built-in functions.

What You can Do with Microsoft Excel

With a good know-how of this spreadsheet program, you can do the following effectively on your own.

• Create, manage, and analyze data like the list of your employees, their age, sex, state/country, department, discipline, Salary, etc.
• Create, manage and analyze your firm's financial status.
• Perform Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).
• Solve mathematical problems like equations and matrices.
• Automate most of your tasks using Visual Basic for Application Excel (VBA).

MICROSOFT EXCEL USER INTERFACE

Microsoft Excel has now replaced its menu bar and toolbars with The Ribbon . This is the area above
the formula bar. I will discuss the most commonly used components of this Excel interface below:

The Home Menu

This contains all the most commonly used functions and tools in Excel. The AutoSum, copy and paste, text and number alignment, and find/replace tools are here but notice that they have their own groups: the Clipboard command group holds the clipboard tools, the Font group holds the font tools and like that.

The Ribbon

This is a key graphical interface feature of Excel. It is a toolbar that contains icons for the most common commands. Think of the Ribbon, which is new to Excel, as a Turbo Toolbar. It helps speed your workflow by enabling easy navigation to the tools you need. Unlike the old style menus, which you have to open each time you want to use a tool, the Ribbon's toolbars stay exploded open.
To see the Ribbon in action, create a small table of data in a worksheet, then select the Insert menu tab. The Ribbon changes completely, filling its width with an array of objects that you can
insert into a worksheet.

The clipboard viewer

This is a component ofthe usual copy and paste tools. Clipboard Viewer lets you paste any of 24 clipboard items
that you previously copied to the clipboard. You have to click on the Clipboard group's dialog launcher to open the Clipboard Viewer. If you leave open the Clipboard Viewer and copy several worksheet cells to the clipboard, the clipboard viewer dynamically updates with each copy, displaying
the source and content of the copied item.

The Insert Menu

This menu fills the width of the Excel Ribbon with icons whose tools and
functions insert objects into worksheets. For example, the command groups Tables, Illustrations, Charts, SmartArt, Links, and Text hold objects you can insert in worksheets. Using the Pivot Tables you can quickly arrange lists and tables.

The Formula Menu

Whem you click this menu, it loads onto the Ribbon the functions and components you need to do computations on your data. Here are the command groups for the Formula menu: the Function Library, with subcategories (like financial, logical, data and time) of functions you can use to run calculations on your data.
the Define Names group, which lets you
create, for example, a name to refer to a cell, table, or any other object. By using names, you won’t have to use range name like “c5:c37"
You also have Formula Auditing, which lets you track down and validate the inputs to your worksheet's functions and Calculation, which lets you specify when and how often worksheet functions get recalculated.

The Review Menu

This contains tool groups for spell-checking your workbook, adding comments to it, and locking it to prevent unauthorized changes to your data. The level of control you have here
is considerable. For example, using the "Allow Users" to Edit Ranges tool, you can specify exactly which users on your network may modify data in your workbook. You can create such permissions down to the level of a worksheet cell, or any range of cells.
Note that as an organization, you need to use this menu to great advantage.

The View Menu

Using this menu, you can work with tools for arranging windows, so you can see the data in your workbook clearly. Take note of the following tools from the View menu:

Workbook Views: With this, you can apply different views to your worksheets, e.g. a full screen view and print preview.

Show/Hide: With this, you can expose or hide gridlines and column and row headings.

Zoom: With this, you can zoom in or out on data.

Window: With this, you can open new windows to view two distant parts of the current worksheet at the same time.

Macros: With this, you can record scripts that automate Excel with your project procedures.

The Developer Menu

This menu contains tool groups that developers can use to extend and automate Excel's out-of-the-box functionality. Included here are tools to record macro scripts, in fact you can create scripts to automate any procedure you want in excel using Visual Basic for Excel and import XML files. With the Controls command group, you can also add buttons to your worksheet, to call up custom forms for data entry or a macro script.

You may like to check out my Microsoft Excel book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple or any other of your favorite eBook store.

Amazon US

Amazon UK

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