Introduction to Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel nowadays is nothing but an important skill to learn. In job sectors, Excel is a must to use over and over again.
So it is very essential for students from schools and universities to learn and explore Excel in this pandemic.
If you open Excel in your screen, there will be several options on the right sections. You can see the recent sheets you have used there. Other than that you can find several templates also. If you open a file you will see some tabs across the top. Such as,
- File
- Home
- Insert
- Page layout
- Formulas
- Data
- Review
- View
- Acrobat
For different versions the layout might be different. When you click on the tops, you can see some options underneath also which are called ribbons. In the ribbons you will find some groups also. Some ribbons might not have any options. In that case you can just click on them to operate some tasks like changing font size , colors etc.
So for now we can say
Top to bottom we have
- Tabs
- Ribbons
- Groups
Then we will find some columns and rows.
For your information , columns are those who are placed vertically and rows are those who are placed horizontally. And a specific place inside the table would be called cells.
So each cell contains data here. A plus sign will indicate what is on the cell and pressing enter will assign the values there. And the whole thing is called a workbook. And as we are going to work on there, there will be worksheets in the workbook. We can see that right on the bottom there where we can find sheet1, sheet2, sheet3 etc. By double clicking on them you can rename the sheets also.
To see your data on the excel sheet more clearly you can click on the view option where you can zoom the sheets as much as you want. You can also make it larger or smaller by clicking on the right of the bottom also.
So at first when entering the titles, we can just type the names and press enter to insert them. Whatever cell we tap, the arrow will work on the specific cell. We can use the right or left arrow to get to the right or left cells. We can also use the Shift+down and enter, it will move to the top. By pressing enter we can move it down, by pressing Shift+down and tap it will move to the right. Whenever you need to stretch out a column or a row, there will be a handle in the middle line there by which you can reshape the size as much as you want . So to resize the cells you can double click on the middle line and you can undo that by pressing Ctrl+Z or right on top there will be a back option too. Whenever we want to reshape the whole row or the whole column section, we can just click on the left bottom of the column for selecting the whole row there and then reshape them. For example if we want to resize row number 1, we can click on the row which is placed on the most top and there will be an option where the numbers will be placed like 1,2,3 etc where for row number 1 we can choose 1 to select the whole first row. We can also border the cells by using the rectangular icon on top there. In that rectangular group, there are several options like
- Bottom border
- Top border
- Left border
- Right border
- No border
- All border
- Outside borders
- Thick outside borders
- Bottom double border
- Thick double border etc.
Now the border is important here as , when we are printing the sheets there will be no borders so if we add borders it will be specific and clear to look at and to find a specific cell.
Now after entering the data, they might look messy as the data in a specific column might not adjust into the specified rows . In that case, what we can do is, we can select one column and use wrap text and it will wrap the data into the column. We can also re-title the worksheet by right clicking on the title bar numbered 1 and press the insert option which will make place for another title bar.
So that was all for today. Wait for the next one to explore Excel more !
