Excel Basics
This page explains the basic points of Excel. Since Rod and I teach students of all skill levels,
including those who have never used Excel before, I thought it was about time for a page like this.
Where is Excel anyway?
There are four ways to locate the Excel application. Here are the ways explained, starting with the most
convenient way.
- Desktop shortcut: The easiest way to look for Excel is for a shortcut on the Desktop. Here is what it looks like for Excel 2003.
Other versions may look slightly different. To open this shortcut, either click it once and press the Enter key, or
double-click the shortcut.
- Start Menu: If you do not have an Excel Desktop shortcut, click the Start Menu button in the lower left. If you have
used Excel recently, it will be stacked up with other shortcuts, just above the Start Menu button. To open this shortcut, click it once.
- If you haven't used Excel recently, then look for it under the Start Menu button, the All Programs button (pictured above), and look
in the list of installed programs for Microsoft Office. Once you find it, click on it, and you should see something like below.
To open this shortcut, click it once.
- If none of the ways to find Excel above work, your last resort is to open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office
Open Excel once you have found the shortcut. This is what you see:
Basic Excel terminology
Workbook: What you are looking at above is called a workbook. You may hear people refer
to this as a "spreadsheet". This term goes back to versions of Excel that contained only a worksheet, or spreadsheet.
Today's versions of Excel can contain many worksheets, see Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3, above. The term "spreadsheet",
while common, is rather vague, because what sheet does it refer to now?
What else can you see in the image above?
There is a grid of faint grey lines. The rectangles are called cells. The cell with the heavy black "border" around it is
called the active cell. I say "border", because it's not really a border, which is a cell format. The active cell
appears to have a border so you can immediately see which cell is active.
How do we tell one cell from another?
Cells are organized in columns and rows of cells. The columns are named A, B, C, ... The cells are also organized into
rows, numbered 1, 2, 3, ... So the cell in column A and in row 1 has an address of A1.
The address is a coordinate. Notice that you can see the cell address A1 below the $ sign icon and above the letter "A"
that labels column A. This is another reason why the active cell appears to have a border - so you don't have to keep looking up in this area
to see what the active cell address is.
Looking at the top of the image above, you can see a row of names File, Edit, View, ... This row is a menu.
Just below it are two rows of images or icons. These rows are toolbars.
Basic Excel cell navigation
As you work with Excel you will have to move to or select a cell, or move to or select a group of cells
called a range.
You can do this by either moving your mouse over a cell and clicking (selecting) it, or by using some keys on the keyboard.
Useful navigation keys on the keyboard are:
- the up and down arrow keys, and the left and right arrow keys, which are in a group on the keyboard.
These keys will move to, or select one cell at a time.
- Page Up & Page Down keys. Pressing these keys will navigate up or down for as many rows that you can see in the Excel window.
For example, if you have maximized the Excel window, and you can see rows 1 to 48 and if cell A1 is the active cell,
then pressing Page Down once will activate cell A49 and you will be looking at rows 49 to 96.
Other ways of workbook, worksheet, and cell navigation are described on
Keyboard Shortcuts and on
Tips and Tricks.