01 Introducing Excel

introduce you to Excel and explain what you should see on the screen. It will also explain how to find basic commands and tools in different menus.

Why use Excel?

Excel is a useful programme to use if you want to create documents containing numbers or numerical data as well as text. The programme allows you to easily create books with worksheets and save them, adjust the data and lay it out to your liking, amend and correct the data and move it around, present data in different tables and charts, use formulae and perform functions, sort data, include graphics and much, much more.

Opening up Excel

To access Excel click on Start at the bottom left of the screen. On the pop-up menu click on All Programmes and on the next pop-up menu click on Microsoft Excel. Alternatively, if you can see a Microsoft Excel icon on the desktop click on it.

When you open up Excel for the first time the screen layout should look like this:

Have a good look at the screen layout.

At the top is a blue bar. At the left end of the blue bar you will see that you have opened Book 1 in Microsoft Excel. At the right end of the blue bar you will see three small boxes with pictures in them.

The first box is the minimize button. This allows you to shrink the Excel window so that it appears as a small oblong at the bottom of the screen, but the book is not closed. A minimized book can be restored to a larger size by clicking on the small oblong (at the bottom of the screen).

The second box is the restore button. This allows you to restore the Excel window to its previous size.

The third box (marked with an X) is the close box. This allows you to close the Excel window including any open documents.

Excel allows you to create worksheets and perform automatic calculations. Each Excel file is a workbook that can hold many worksheets although each one usually starts with 3 (shown at the bottom left of the screen). The worksheet is a grid made up of columns (designated by letters) and rows (designated by numbers). The letters and numbers of the columns and rows (called labels) are displayed in grey buttons across the top and down the left side of the worksheet. Where a column and a row intersect is called a cell. Each cell on the worksheet has a cell address which is made up of the column label and the row label. The illustration above shows a black border around the cell with address A1. Cells can contain either text, numbers, or mathematical formulae.

Using Pop-down menus

Underneath the blue bar is what's called the menu bar:

Each word on this bar is the name of a pop-down menu. When you click on any of these words the menu will pop-down on the screen. The menus in Excel sometimes display only the commands recently used.

To view ALL the available commands in a menu:

1. Click the double arrows at the bottom of the menu.
   So for example, by clicking on Format the menu on the left below might appear on the screen. This shows just some of the commands available in this menu. By clicking on the double arrows at the bottom of the menu all the commands in the Format menu appear like the menu shown on the right.

Or

1. Click on the menu name.
2. When the menu pops down wait for a short while. The rest of the menu will soon appear.

To customizing the pop-down menus so they ALWAYS show ALL the commands:

1. Click on View in the menu bar.
2. In this menu use the mouse to move the pointer onto Toolbars.
3. In the Toolbars menu click on Customize.
4. In the Customize box click on the Options tab:



5. Click the box next to Always show full menus.
6. When you have finished click Close.

Underneath the menu bar are two more bars that spread across the screen. The first one is the Standard toolbar and the one underneath is the Formatting toolbar. You can learn more about these toolbars in the handouts:

Short-cut Menus

Shortcut menus are slightly different to pop-down menus. They allow you to access various Excel commands faster than using the options on the menu bar. Most of the time when you use the mouse you will click the left button. Shortcut menus only display the options that can be applied to the item that is right-clicked. This facility can save you time because you wont have to search through all the menu options in the menu bar until you find the command you are looking for.

To open up a shortcut menu:

1. Click on the right mouse button anywhere on the screen.



A different menu will appear depending on where you place the mouse. So a right click on the blue bar will give a menu that is different to a right click on the menu bar which will be different again from a right click on a page of an open document (shown above).
2. Carry out a command from the menu in the usual way by moving the pointer on to the command and then left clicking on the mouse.

Understanding Toolbars and how they work

A Toolbar is a bar a bit like the menu bar at the top of the screen. Each toolbar contains shortcut buttons for tools that fit into the theme of the bar. If you click on View in the menu bar and then highlight Toolbars a list of available toolbars will appear. The illustration below shows what you will see if you do this.

The above illustration shows a tick beside two particular toolbars which means that the Standard and Formatting toolbars will appear on the screen. As you are a beginner to Excel I would recommend that you always have these two toolbars visible on the screen.

To add and remove a toolbar from the screen:

1. Click on View on the menu bar.
2. Move the pointer to Toolbars.
3. In the pop-down menu click on the name of the toolbar you want to add to or remove from the screen.
   The menu will automatically close and the toolbar you chose will be either added to or removed from the screen.
4. Repeat the above steps for each toolbar you want to add to or remove from the screen.

Exercises

For exercises to practice the above click here.

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