Status Bar File Tab Title Bar Minimise | Restore Down | Close Buttons Ribbon Help Groups Vertical Scroll Bar Zoom Slider Horizontal Scroll Bar
View Buttons Worksheet Tabs Rows Columns Active Cell (currently A1) Insert Worksheet Worksheet Navigation Buttons Expand Formula Bar Formula Bar Select All Button Tabs FILE TAB The File Tab replaces the Office Button or File menu from previous versions of Excel and allows you to access commonly used file management commands such as:
QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR The Quick Access Toolbar allows easy access to a number of commands including the ones displayed here (from left to right): Save; Undo; Redo; New; Open and Quick Print. NB This toolbar can be customised via the arrow button at the far right hand side of the toolbar. RIBBON The Ribbon replaces drop-down menus and toolbars from previous versions of Word. It consists of 3 elements: Tabs; Groups and Commands. Whenever you select a tab you will see that the ribbon will change to show groups and commands which are relevant to the sphere of activity covered by that tab. The ribbon allows easy and more visible access to groups of related commands which were previously buried in various menus, toolbars and/or task panes. NB You can minimise the ribbon by clicking on the arrow just to the left of the help icon on the top right hand side of the screen. TABS Not including the File tab there are 7 permanent tabs: Home; Insert; Page Layout; Formulas; Data; Review and View. Each of these tabs control a particular sphere of activity (e.g. data can be imported,sorted, filtered etc. using the Data tab). In addition to these basic tabs there are other on-demand tabs which only appear whenever a specific element such as a table, a picture or a drawing object is selected or inserted. Notice that these tabs are grouped according to the object, which has been selected, inserted or modified, using coloured tabs in the Title Bar. GROUPS Within each tab there are several Groups which show related clusters of commands as illustrated here using the Number group which includes the related commands of Number Format (e.g. General, Number, Currency, Short/Long Date, Percentage, Text etc.); Accounting NumberFormat (clicking on the arrow next to this icon allows you to choose between English (UK), English (US), Euro or more accounting formats); Percent Style; Comma Style and Increase/Decrease Decimal (to increase or decrease the number of places after the decimal point). You can also click on the Dialog Box Launcher (arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the group) to open the Format Cells dialog box where further related options can be selected including text Alignment (including Orientation), Font, Border and Fill. NAME BOX The Name Box displays the cell reference of the active cell or the top left-hand cell of a range of selected cells with the column label followed by the row label (e.g. A19 = column A, row 19). Clicking on the arrow on the right-hand side of the Name Box allows you to enter the cell reference of a cell which will become the active cell as soon as you press the Enter key. FORMULA BAR The Formula Bar displays the formula used in a selected cell and also allows you to manually enter a formula whose result you want to display in the active cell. The Formulas Tab displays the very wide range of possible formulas, which all begin with an equals sign (=), and use one or more operators (e.g. add (+), subtract (- ), multiply (*) and divide (/) are all arithmetic operators). Some commonly used formulas are displayed by clicking on the arrow to the right of the AutoSum command from where you can also click on the More Functions command to access the full range of formulas. NB The arrow to the right of the Formula Bar allows you to expand the Formula Bar for more complex formulas. WORKSHEET TABS Worksheet Tabs allow you to view the various worksheets which make up a particular workbook. NB By default three worksheets are created with every new workbook although extra worksheets can be created, if required, by clicking on the Insert Worksheet command which appears at the end of the Worksheet Tabs. Also there are navigation buttons, to the left of the Worksheet Tabs, which can be used if there are more tabs than can be displayed in the space available. HOW TO DO LIST Create a chart You can create a chart in Excel as follows: enter the data, to be displayed in the chart, onto a worksheet; select the cells which contain this data; click on the Insert tab to display the Charts group; from the Charts group click on the type of chart you want to create (e.g. Column, Line, Pie, Bar etc.) to display the various options available for this type of chart (NB you can view the full range of possible charts in the Insert Chart dialog box which can be opened either by clicking on the arrow in the box right-hand corner of the Charts group or by clicking on the All Chart Types command which appears at the bottom of any of the chart type options whenever you select a particular type of chart; your chart should now be displayed along with three additional tabs, Design, Layout and Format (grouped under Chart Tools which now appears in the Title Bar) these tabs provide a wide range of options to change the appearance of your chart and to allow you to add additional information (e.g. clicking on the Layout tab allows you to add/amend a Chart Title and Axis Titles using commands from the Labels group) NB some commands are also available by right- clicking on the chart but note that the menu options will change depending on where you right-click.
Using AutoSum AutoSum allows easy access to the most commonly used functions in Excel including: Sum (default function): totals all selected values Average: gives average value from selected data Count numbers: counts number of values selected Max/Min: identifies maximum/minimum value from selection NB AutoSum is so popular that it appears on two tabs: Home (in Editing group) and Formulas (in Function Library group). Also when you select values on a worksheet the results for Average, Count and Sum are displayed automatically on the Status Bar. Resize columns / You may need to resize columns or rows in your worksheet to accommodate large numbers or longer pieces of text. There are rows various ways that you can resize columns in Excel (rows can be resized in a similar way): 1. click and drag the right-hand boundary of the column heading (i.e. between column labels A, B, C etc.) to desired width; 2. double-click the right-hand boundary of the column heading to auto fit the column (i.e. automatically increase or decrease the width of the column to accommodate the amount of data entered into that column); 3. with the active cell in the column you want to resize or with that column selected click on the Format command (in the Cells group of the Home tab), then click on Column Width and then enter the desired width of the column measured in the number of characters it should accommodate (0 min. 255 max., default width is 8.43 characters). NB You can also apply any of the above to multiple columns by firstly selecting the columns to be resized by clicking and dragging across the column headings (or you can select all columns in your worksheet by clicking on the Select All button - a grey triangle in a white box in the top left hand corner of the worksheet) and then following the above instructions. You can also use the Wrap Text command to make text fit into a column as follows: select the cell or cells you want to format click on the Wrap Text command in the Alignment group of the Home tab.
Printing worksheets It can be problematic to print out worksheets as frequently they will not fit onto an A4 page using the default settings. However there are several options available to you to make sure that your spreadsheets print out correctly: 1. You can quickly see if the worksheet will fit on a printed page by: changing from the default Normal view to Page Layout view using either the View buttons, on the right-hand side of the Status Bar, or by clicking on Page Layout in the Workbook Views group of the View tab (NB notice that if you switch back to Normal view a dotted line to indicate automatic page breaks now appears this also happens if you use Print Preview or Page Break Preview); in the View tab select Page Break Preview from the Workbook Views group to view and adjust where the automatic page breaks will occur (dotted line = automatic page break; solid line = manual page break) NB you can click and drag these page breaks and Excel will adjust the scaling of the worksheet to fit on a printed page. 2. You can also use the Print command (click on File Tab Print) to preview the worksheet before printing and, if necessary, click on Page Setup to open the Page Setup dialog box where you can: change the Orientation from Portrait to Landscape (available from the Page tab in the dialog box); shrink (or enlarge) worksheets to fit on a printed page by adjusting the Scaling using the Adjust to % normal size or Fit to option (available from the Page tab in the dialog box); if available, choose a larger Paper size to print on to (e.g. A3) (available from the Page tab in the dialog box); reduce the margins (available from the Margins tab in the dialog box) (NB you can also adjust margins using the Margins command in the Page Setup group of the Page Layout tab). NB You can also open the Page Setup dialog box by clicking on the dialog box launcher in the right hand bottom corner of the Page Setup group in the Page Layout tab.