Computer Beginner Guide

Learning how to move around the Excel grid quickly and confidently is an indispensable skill. To move from cell to cell, you have two basic choices: Use the arrow keys on the keyboard. Keystrokes move you one cell at a time in any direction. Click the cell with the mouse. A mouse click jumps you directly to the cell you've clicked. As you move from cell to cell, you see the black focus box move to highlight the currently active cell. In some cases, you might want to cover ground a little quicker. You can use any of the shortcut keys. The most useful shortcut keys include the Home key combinations, which bring you back to the beginning of a row or the top of your worksheet. ., Excel also lets you cross great distances in a single bound using a Ctrl+arrow key combination. These key combinations jump to the edges of your data. Edge cells include cells that are next to other blank cells. For example, if you press Ctrl+ → while you're inside a group of cells wi...

When you first launch Excel, it starts you off with a new, blank worksheet, as shown in Figure 1. A worksheet is the grid of cells where you type your information and formulas; it takes up most of the window. This grid is the most important part of the Excel window. It's where you'll perform all your work, such as entering data, writing formulas, and reviewing the results. Here are a few basics about Excel's grid: The grid divides your worksheet into rows and columns. Columns are identified with letters (A, B, C…), while rows are identified with numbers (1, 2, 3…). The smallest unit in your worksheet is the cell. Cells are identified by column and row. For example, C6 is the address of a cell in column C (the third column), and row 6 (the sixth row). Incidentally, an Excel cell can hold up to 32,000 characters. A worksheet can span an eye-popping 16,000 columns and 1 million rows. In the unlikely case that you want to go beyond those limits say yo...

The most dramatic change in Office 2007 is the new user interface. Traditional menus and toolbars are gone, and they’ve been replaced with the Ribbon. Office 2007 is the first software in history to use this new interface, and it remains to be seen whether it will catch on and replace traditional menus and toolbars . The commands available in the Ribbon vary, depending upon which tab is selected. The Ribbon is arranged into groups of related commands. Here’s a quick overview of Excel’s tabs. Home: You’ll probably spend most of your time with the Home tab selected. This tab contains the basic Clipboard commands, formatting commands, style commands, commands to insert and delete rows or columns, plus an assortment of worksheet editing commands. Insert: Select this tab when you need to insert something in a worksheet—a table, a diagram, a chart, a symbol, and so on. Page Layout: This tab contains commands that affect the overall appearance of your worksheet,...

Excel, as you probably know, is the world’s most widely-used spreadsheet program, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. Other spreadsheet programs are available, but Excel is by far the most popular and has become the world standard. Much of the appeal of Excel is due to the fact that it’s so versatile. Excel’s forte, of course, is performing numerical calculations, but Excel is also very useful for non-numerical applications. Here are just a few of the uses for Excel: Number crunching: Create budgets, analyze survey results, and perform just about any type of financial analysis you can think of. Creating charts: Create a wide variety of highly customizable charts. Organizing lists: Use the row-and-column layout to store lists efficiently. Accessing other data: Import data from a wide variety of sources. Creating graphics and diagrams: Use Shapes and the new SmartArt to create professional-looking diagrams. Automating complex tasks: Perform a tedious t...

When you’re on your computer and want to crunch some numbers, you use a program called a spreadsheet. There are several different spreadsheet programs available for your personal computer. Full-featured spreadsheet programs include Microsoft Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, and Corel’s Quattro Pro; for more casual users, there’s also the Works Spreadsheet included in Microsoft Works and Works Suite. The most popular spreadsheet among serious number crunchers is Microsoft Excel, which is included as part of the Microsoft Office suite. That’s the spreadsheet we’ll look at in this tutorial, although the other spreadsheet programs operate in a similar fashion. What is Spreadsheets? A spreadsheet is nothing more than a giant list. Your list can contain just about any type of data you can think of—text, numbers, and even dates. You can take any of the numbers on your list and use them to calculate new numbers. You can sort the items on your list, pretty them up, and print the important po...