What is Excel ?

For those of you, who have never worked with Excel, Excel is a spreadsheet program which is used to calculate, compare, organize and present data.
You can start Excel by clicking the “Start” button. That is the bottom left on the taskbar.
Point to “Programs” and double click on “Microsoft Excel 2007”.

The new user interface

Those who have already worked with previous versions of Excel, will notice that the user interface in “Excel 2007” is completely changed.Now we use the “Ribbon” instead of different toolbars with the different commands. All commands here are classified in a logical manner.

Let me first explain what we see when we open “Excel 2007”.
New feature in “Excel 2007” is the round “Office” button at the top left of the application window.
This replaces the “File” button, which we find in the “Menu bar” in previous versions of Excel.

On the right side of the Office button we find the “Quick access toolbar”.
This is also new in “Excel 2007”.
We will see more on this in the next lessons.

In the middle of the title bar, we find the name of our document, folder 1, and the name of the application, Microsoft Excel.
On the right side of the title bar we find the “Minimize”, “Maximize/Restore”, and “Close” buttons.

Under the title bar we find the “Ribbon”.

The “Ribbon” replaces the toolbars and commands which we used in earlier versions of Excel.
The “Ribbon” is discussed in subsequent lessons.

Below the “Ribbon”, we find the “Name box” and the “Formula bar”.
Both are not new, but they added new features in the formula bar.

We still have the rows that are identified by numbers, and the columns that are identified by letters.
We now have e more than 1 million rows, and over 16.000 columns.
The point of intersection of a column and row is still referred as a cell.
At the bottom of the worksheet, on the left side, we still have the buttons to navigate between the worksheets.
In addition to the tabs for the different worksheets, we have a new tab “Insert Worksheet” to insert a new worksheet.
And we have the vertical and horizontal scroll bars.

One more new feature in “Excel 2007”, are the buttons with different page views.
We find these buttons below the horizontal scroll bar.
These will also be discussed later.

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