Getting Started in Excel

Having taught Beginner's, Intermediate, and Advanced Excel as a volunteer to the public for the past three years, I thought I would illustrate some common issues that I see.

Viewing the Task Pane

This is a relatively new feature to Excel. Usually if I see a new feature, I dismiss it since I've been pretty happy with what Excel has given me since Excel 95. Also, when teaching Excel with a projector in a classroom with 3 rows of seats, I zoom the window out to 150% or 200% so the students in the last row can see what I am doing. That means I need as much of a workable area in the Excel worksheet as possible. That means I close the task pane.

The Task Pane can come in handy though. If you want to open a work book that you were recently working on then instead of navigating through Windows Explorer to find the workbook, just open Excel, look in the Task Pane and you should see your workbook name there. Click on it and it opens. Then I close the Task Pane.

Customizing the Menubars and Toolbars

One feature that I find annoying that starting showing up in Office 2000 was the one that shows "full menus after a short delay" I thought it used to say "show only recently used menus". Either way, when I click on a menu item such as Edit, I want to see all of the sub-menu items at once. Here is the difference between the two options:

full menus after a short delay	always show full menus

To change to the "always show full menus" option, go to Tools, Customize, Options tab and check the "Always show full menus" check box. While you are there, check the one above it if it not already checked - "Show Standard and Formating toolbars on two rows"