What is Excel?

For those of you who have never worked with “Excel”, “Excel” is an electronic spreadsheet program that can be used to manipulate data, represent data in a graph and present data from a database in a sorted manner.

You can start “Excel” by clicking the “Start” button (1) on the left of the
bottom taskbar of your main computer screen.

Click “All Programs” in the menu that appears.

Click “Microsoft Office” (2).
Then click “Microsoft Excel 2010” (3).

The user interface

Let me first explain what we see when we open “Excel” 2010:

At the top of the application window we find the “Title Bar”. In the center of the “Title bar”, the name of our document, “Book1” and the name of the application, “Microsoft Excel” appear. On the left, we find the “Quick Access” toolbar and on the right side we have the “Minimize” “Maximize” and “Close” buttons. I’m assuming that everyone knows what the “Minimize” “Maximize” and “Close” buttons do as they are common in all Microsoft applications.

I will discuss the “Quick Access” toolbar extensively in the next lesson

Under the “Title bar”, we find the “Ribbon”.

The “Ribbon” will be discussed in a subsequent lesson.

Below the “Ribbon”, we find the “Name Box” and “Formula Bar”.

The “Name box” indicates the name of the selected cell.

Next, we have rows which are identified by numbers and columns, identified by letters.

The point of intersection of a column of a row is called a cell. The selected cell in the “Worksheet” is shown in the “Name box”.

In the picture above, cell A1 is selected.

At the bottom of the “Worksheet”, on the left side, we find buttons to navigate between different “Worksheets”.
We also have the tabs for the various “Worksheets”, plus a tab to add a new worksheet. By default, a “Workbook” comes with three “Worksheets”. More can be added, if needed.

Below the “Worksheets”, we find the “Status bar”. On the right side of the “Status bar” we find the buttons with different page views, and a slider to zoom in and out. If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use this to quickly zoom in and out.

Finally, we have the vertical and horizontal scroll bars.

Now that you are familiar with the names, we can dive into the details of Excel.

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