An Introduction to Microsoft Excel - Part 1

This article is an introduction to Excel for new users. It won’t teach you Excel and will not cover every option available, but will try to illustrate some basic “getting started” themes and hopefully introduce you to some useful hints and tips, thereby encouraging you to explore Excel yourself and find more things that you didn’t realise were possible. This article has been written using Excel 2002 as the demonstration version. Many of the tips however, will apply to all versions from Excel 97 onwards, except Excel 2007.


A Brief History

Around 30 years ago, a spreadsheet was green ledger paper, a pencil and an eraser – honestly! Running totals were usually done with the assistance of an adding machine. Any mistakes found had to be backtracked and each day’s figures amended manually. However, in 1979, Don Bricklin and Bob Frankston produced something called VisiCalc and it ran on the Apple II computer – the spreadsheet was born. Then Lotus 1-2-3 appeared in 1983. It actually ran in DOS but had a firm grip on the spreadsheet market till the early 1990s when MS started making improvements to Excel. Lotus meanwhile, kept producing DOS versions of 1-2-3, which, in hindsight, was perhaps not the best idea. MS improved each version of Excel and eventually added in the ability to write macros, called Visual Basic for Applications or VBA. It is now estimated that Excel is in use in over 400 million desktop systems worldwide.


The Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a collection of worksheets. Each worksheet consists of a collection of boxes, called cells, aligned vertically and horizontally. Currently, Excel has 256 columns and 65536 rows (although it looks like this will change with Office 2007) which gives 16,777,216 cells in each sheet. This is generally enough for most users. So, what can you do with all these cells? Pretty much anything, but Excel is superb for storing and analysing all kinds of data. Excel has many powerful built-in functions and commands, many of which even serious power users have not fully utilised.

Anyway, let’s get started. Open Excel – it should automatically open a new, blank workbook for you.

One of the first things you may notice is that not all the icons or toolbars are showing. This is very annoying – at least for me. How can you learn where a menu command is if you can’t see it? This image shows how Excel, by default, hides menu items.

To show the full menu, you need to point to the down arrows at the end of the menu. The same is true of the menu bars. You can’t see all the buttons and have to click on the arrows at the end of the bar.

However, we can change this by turning off the Adaptive menus. Click on Tools on the menu bar – expand the menu if you have to - then choose Customize.

Make sure the Options tab is selected and then check the two boxes at the top. Click OK to exit.

Now Excel will show you the main toolbars, one on each line and also the full dropdown menus. To me, this is much easier and makes menu navigation much more straightforward.


Let’s look at a simple set of data

If you have re-created this example, let me ask you a quick question. Did you manually type all the names of the months? If you did, there is a quicker way. Type in the first two months only. Then highlight both cells like this:

Now move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the highlighted cells until the cursor changes to a cross. Now, holding down the left mouse button, drag the highlight down the column. When you release the mouse button, Excel will have completed the series for you. You can repeat this if you like and drag down the column for as far as you want. Excel knows that you want to complete a series and will kindly produce endless lists of the months of the year for you.

OK, we now have some data to work with. The next step is…………let go your mouse! Excel has a barrel full of simple, quick keyboard commands that can do most things a great deal quicker than the mouse. Many of these commands are not unique to Excel – they will work in all Microsoft Office applications. Here’s a seemingly endless list of keyboard commands in Excel.

The first tip is to press the Scroll Lock key. Notice that the letters SCRL appear in the Status Bar at the bottom right of the screen.

Now the four arrow keys will operate in the same way as the mouse on a scroll bar. Try it and see.

Press Scroll Lock again to turn it off and make sure cell A1 is highlighted. Note that the highlighted cell is known as the active cell. Only one cell can be the active cell. Now let’s move around our spreadsheet using the keyboard. Press Ctrl+Down Arrow (that is: press the Control key and, still holding down the Control key, press once on the Down Arrow key). The active cell now becomes cell A8. Now press Ctrl+Up Arrow – the highlight jumps back to cell A1. You can try this with the left and right arrow keys. Now you have moved around a spreadsheet using only the keyboard. Wouldn’t you agree it’s much quicker than scrolling with mouse?

To select a range of cells we use the Shift key rather than the Control key. Make sure that cell A1 is highlighted. Now hold down the Shift key and press the Down Arrow key a few times. Cells from A1 down the column have been highlighted. Now press Shift+Right Arrow and you will see the highlight move across the sheet. To do the same thing even quicker, we can add the Control key into the mix. Make sure cell A1 is highlighted. Now hold down the Shift and Control keys and then press the Down Arrow key once. What has happened? All the cells with data in column A have been highlighted. Repeat this except using the Right Arrow key. Now all the data has been highlighted, using just two keystrokes! Now, in our small sample this may not look impressive, but what if you had a sheet with data in thousands of rows? How much easier is using this method rather than scrolling with the mouse?

OK so we can move around our small data sample using the keyboard. But what if we wanted to move between worksheets? Simple – Ctrl+Page Down to move to the next worksheet or Ctrl+Page Up to move to the previous worksheet.

The most common operations, and key combinations that many Windows users will know, are Cut, Copy and Paste. For new users not familiar with these, the keyboard commands are as follows:

Ctrl+X Cut
Ctrl+C Copy
Ctrl+V Paste, with option to repeat the command
Enter Paste, without the option to repeat the command.

You can, of course, copy and paste using your mouse and Drag and Drop.

Here’s a method of copying data from one cell to thousands of other cells without scrolling or moving around a worksheet. Go to a blank worksheet and in cell A1 type TSF. Making sure A1 is highlighted, press Ctrl+C. Now use the Arrow Down key to move to cell A2. Just above cell A1 you will see a box – this is called the Name box – type A5000 in this box.

Now press Shift+Enter and then Enter. Now press Ctrl+End to take you to cell A5000 to see the results!