In Module 6, you learn about Microsoft Excel 2013. Chapter 1 covers creating an Excel workbook, including entering data and navigating. Chapter 2 deals with performing calculations. In Chapter 3, you use formatting tools to add visual appeal. In Chapter 4, you learn about working with charts and graphs.
You are continuing your work for The Chocolate Museum, a nonprofit organization that provides educational exhibits and information on the history of chocolate and its role in world cultures. The Museum must plan and budget for its exhibits and gift shop, and this planning requires tracking dates and calculating financial information. In this chapter, you produce an Excel workbook containing schedule and cost information for a new exhibit on chocolate in world cultures.
The data should guide your decisions about the best way to lay out a workbook and organize data on the worksheets.
Once you have entered and organized data on the worksheets, you can make any necessary calculations. For example, if you have four columns of quarterly sales data, you can create a formula that sums the values of each column to give you a quarterly total. And for each data row, you can create a formula that sums the results for the product in each row.
If your worksheet includes an area where the user enters values to be calculated by Excel, position those input cells in a prominent location—usually near the top of the worksheet or on a separate worksheet—and apply formatting that prompts the user for entries
Charts convey data graphically, allowing you to easily spot trends and abnormalities.
Examples
Charted data can help you quickly identify the trend if sales for a particular product lag far behind sales for other products.
You need to keep industry standards in mind in the financial industry, where professionals follow accepted conventions and, in some cases, legal requirements when they design reports such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and loan payment tables.
In this chapter, you learn how to enter data and navigate in Excel. Because you will be dealing with different types of data—numbers, text, and dates—you will learn how to enter each type of data to ensure that your calculations work. There are tools and tricks to help you out, such as automatically filling entries, quickly adding rows or columns, or checking the spelling of cell contents. Rather than setting up each Excel spreadsheet as a single and lengthy page of data, you learn how to organize data on multiple pages, called worksheets, to help you group like kinds of data on their own sheets and make navigating your data easier. If you have sales data for different years, for example, you can track each year’s data on a separate sheet in a single workbook. You can add sheets to a workbook and name and rename sheets as needed so that the data is easy to find and work with. Finally, you will learn how to set up and print a worksheet.
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Workbooks are like notebooks. Worksheets are like pages in a notebook. You can add worksheets, or sheets, to your workbook to keep your data organized. Column headings identify each column. Row headings identify each row. You can only make entries in the active cell.
You can use the Formula bar located above the column headings to view and work with the entered data and modify individual cells or a range of cells.
When you start Excel, you can create a blank workbook or select a workbook template. An entry can be a data value like a name, number, or date, or a formula that instructs Excel to perform a calculation.
To open Excel, click the Excel 2013 tile on the Start screen or press Win + C , click the Search charm, and then type Excel.
A ScreenTip that reads Formula Bar appears to identify that screen element.
Only one sheet can be active at any given time. The active sheet is shown with its name underlined in its tab.
The active cell is highlighted with a black border, and the cell name appears in the Name box next to the Formula bar.
Click the up arrow on the vertical scroll bar to move up on the sheet.
The shortcut to make A1 the active cell is Ctrl + Home.
You can also use the Up Arrow, Right Arrow, and Left Arrow keys to move the cursor to a different cell and make that cell active.
You can use the Shift key and any combination of the Down Arrow, Up Arrow, Right Arrow, and Left Arrow to select a range. Another Way: Use the Click, Shift-Click method to select a range: press the left mouse button and drag over the range or click the upper left cell and hold down Shift as you click the lower right cell.
Click the down arrow and up arrow buttons on the vertical scroll bar, as shown in the illustration in this slide, to move down or up the page. Notice that scrolling does not change the selected cell.
The Go To dialog box is another way to move to a cell and make it the active cell.
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You can identify each cell by its column letter and row number, called its cell address, cell reference, or cell name.
The entire content of a data cell will display even if it is too long to fit in the cell as long as the cell immediately to the right is empty. If the cell immediately to the right contains data, the overflow cell content will be hidden. The entire contents of a cell will always display in the Formula bar.
All Excel formulas begin with an equals sign. When you type a formula in Excel, you may enter letters as either capital or lowercase. The program automatically capitalizes the letters in the cell as you type. Pressing Ctrl + Enter finishes entering the formula and keeps the cell active.
You can use the Name box to the left of the Formula bar to go to a cell or range.
When you type a range in the Name box, the range of cells is selected. Identify a range by the addresses of its upper left and lower right cells, separating the addresses with a colon. A range can span multiple rows and columns, as it does in the example given in the slide (E5:G7). Alternatively, it can span a single row, as in A3:F3. A range also can fall within a single column, as in C3:C10.
The illustration in this slide shows a formula entered in the active cell, F6, that references the contents in cell A1.
Understanding cell and range addresses is also important when building formulas, a skill you will learn about in Module 6, Chapter 2.
The Quick Analysis button provides hand access to a variety of ways to analyze your data.
A worksheet contains numerous columns and rows. Columns are lettered A–Z and then continue in an AA, AB, AC ... BA, BB, BC format. Rows are numbered sequentially.
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Each cell in an Excel worksheet can hold a single entry. That entry can be text, a date, a value, or a formula that calculates a result. A text entry can contain any combination of letters, numbers, or symbols that you can type on your keyboard. Qtr 1, Sales, or Region# are examples of text entries. By default, Excel aligns text entries at the left side of the cell. This is true even of phone numbers because they usually are entered with hyphens or other characters and are treated as text. Numbers are numeric entries, including whole numbers (15) and decimal values (2.5). You can enter numbers that have certain characteristics, such as currency symbols or a number of decimal places. Number entries are right-aligned.
Another Way: Press the Down Arrow key to finish a cell entry and move one cell down, the Right or Left Arrow keys to move one column to the right or left, or the Up Arrow key to move up one row.
You enter dates in typical date formats, with hyphens (4-1-15) or slashes (4/1/15). By default, if you enter 4/1/15 or 4-1-15, Excel displays 4/1/2015 in the cell.
Notice that the date entries in column B appear to have cut off the entries in column A. The length of the entries requires that you resize column A to accommodate them. Click a cell and look at the Formula bar to confirm that the entire entry is retained in a cell even when it is only partially displayed. The length of the entries requires that you resize column A to accommodate them.
The illustration in this slide displays two date formats. In cell A4, the date was typed as 3-26-15. In cell B7, the date was typed as 5/18. Notice how Excel automatically reformats the date.
This feature (displaying pound signs) is designed to keep readers of the data from being mislead by seeing only a portion of a number.
You will learn more about sizing cells in Chapter 3, Skill 3.
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The Auto Fill and Flash Fill features in Excel 2013 can help you save time when entering data. Auto Fill enables you to either copy an entry across a row or down a column or create a series of entries across a row or down a column. For example, if you enter Jan in a cell and use the Auto Fill feature, Excel enters the following months: Feb, Mar, Apr, and so on.
Ctrl + Enter finishes an entry without moving the cursor to another cell.
The fill handle looks like a small square. Drag when the mouse pointer changes to a black crosshair.
Click the Auto Fill Options button that appears after a fill if you want to change the fill. For example, you might want to fill formatting only or copy cells rather than fill a series.
Auto Fill can also be used to fill the days of the week or common business entries such as Qtr 1, Qtr 2, and so on. If you use Auto Fill to enter a number or other entry that Excel does not recognize as part of a series, Excel simply copies the entry to the area you are filling. You can create your own series by entering the first two or three values in the series and then using Auto Fill from there.
Excel copies the 10 a.m. entry across the selected range. Excel will not fill all times correctly. For example, it fills 12 p.m. and then 13 p.m., an obvious error.
You can type some number formats, such as dollar signs and percent signs, when entering the numbers, or you can apply number formatting later.
The illustration in this slide shows the two dollar amounts that you typed, $4 and $6, selected and the fill handle being dragged down to finish filling the custom series to $10.
Flash Fill looks for patterns in your data and then automatically enters the rest of your data based on the pattern.
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Spreadsheets can be filled with typos, requiring an eagle-eyed person to read closely to find and eliminate those pesky misspellings. Excel includes a feature to help you ensure that your worksheets are free of typos. The Excel spelling checker works much like the Word spelling checker, except that it opens in a dialog box instead of a pane. There is one extra caution with using this feature in Excel: the spelling checker only reviews text entries. It cannot ensure that you have entered numbers and dates correctly, so double-check your data thoroughly!
The spelling checker starts from the current cell, and Excel displays a message when it needs to return to the beginning of the sheet.
You can also turn on the spelling checker with the keyboard shortcut F7.
The message box informs you that the spelling check is complete.
In the illustration in this slide, the Spelling dialog box displays the first typing mistake, Recriut. The correct spelling is already selected in the Suggestions list box, so click the Change button to replace the misspelled word.
Excel can correct some misspellings for you as you type. Each of us has our own unique tendency to mistype certain words. For example, perhaps your last name is Smith, but you often mistype it as Simth. Excel cannot, by default, correct that mistake. However, you can customize the AutoCorrect feature so that the correction will be made.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, read the Checkpoint question and determine which answer is the correct answer. Click anywhere on the slide, and the correct answer will display in green with a green check mark beside it.
You can insert and delete rows and columns within your data to rearrange the data or make room for new data. For example, if you created a worksheet to track the value of products in your company’s inventory, you might need to add rows for new products that you add to your catalog or remove rows when products are discontinued. Each Excel worksheet always has the same number of rows and columns. When you insert and delete rows and columns, you are simply changing where the blank rows and columns appear in the sheet.
Another Way: Right-click a column or row heading and use the Delete option. When you delete a row, Excel removes the row immediately and does not display a warning that you will be deleting the contents of the row. If you accidentally delete the wrong row or column, immediately click the Undo button on the Quick Access toolbar to restore the deleted content.
Another Way: Right-click a column or row heading and use the Insert option.
The illustration in this slide shows one method to delete a sheet row.
Before deleting rows and columns, save your worksheet. Make sure to check the rows and columns before you delete them to be sure you will not be losing important data.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, read the Checkpoint question and determine which answer is the correct answer. Click anywhere on the slide, and the correct answer will display in green with a green check mark beside it.
Given the size of each worksheet, it would be possible to arrange a wide variety of different sets of data in ranges spread throughout a single sheet. However, you would have to spend a lot of time scrolling and otherwise navigating to find the section of the sheet containing the data you want to view and use. Dividing data into multiple worksheets is often more efficient for reading the data. Each Excel workbook enables you to create multiple worksheets. If you have to track data for many stores, no problem! You can create a sheet for each one or copy an existing sheet to a new sheet for editing. You also can delete sheets with old data you no longer need. This skill offers instruction and practice for all of these options.
The Ctrl key allows you to select multiple items, including multiple worksheet tabs. Another Way: You can right-click a sheet tab and then click Delete at the shortcut menu.
The new sheet, named Sheet1 (2), appears and is the active sheet.
The new sheet, named Sheet1 (2), appears and is the active sheet.
The illustration in this slide displays the Move or Copy dialog box that opens when you right-click a sheet tab and click the Move or Copy option.
This action enables you to transfer data to other workbook files using a method that is faster than copying and pasting.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, read the Checkpoint question and determine which answer is the correct answer. Click anywhere on the slide, and the correct answer will display in green with a green check mark beside it.
If the goal of adding worksheets is to make information easier to find and identify, then “mystery” worksheet names, such as Sheet1 and Sheet2, certainly do not help. Giving each worksheet a unique name that identifies its contents makes it much easier to determine which tab to click to find the data you need. Use the worksheet tab to rename the worksheet.
You could also double-click the Sheet tab, type the sheet name, and then press Enter.
The illustration in this slide shows the shortcut menu that displays if you right-click a sheet tab.
A sheet name can be up to 31 characters and can contain most characters on the keyboard, including spaces. Only a handful of characters, such as / (slash), (backslash), * (asterisk), ‘ (apostrophe), and : (colon) are not allowed in worksheet names.
For example, if you are tracking store profitability, you could use green tabs for all the stores making a profit and red tabs for all the stores losing money.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, read the Checkpoint question and determine which answer is the correct answer. Click anywhere on the slide, and the correct answer will display in green with a green check mark beside it.
Whenever possible, many of us try to avoid printing so that we can save paper—and trees! However, distributing printouts, or hard copies, is sometimes the most convenient way to collectively review information in meetings and other situations. When each person has a copy of the item being discussed, individuals can freely jump from page to page and zero in on the data they find important. Excel offers numerous options for setting up and printing a worksheet. This skill will give you a preview of the most useful print settings.
1-2. The shortcut to open the Print backstage area is Ctrl + P.
Verify that the correct printer is selected in the Printer option box. Click the down-pointing arrow to display the drop-down list. Ask your instructor if more than one printer is available and you are not sure which one to choose. You can click other options to print only the active sheets or the entire workbook. To print a selected range, click the down-pointing arrow in the first option box in the Settings section and then click Print Selection to print only the current selection.
The illustration in this slide displays the Print backstage area.
The printed appearance of your worksheet can be modified using the PAGE LAYOUT tab or the Page Setup button in the Print backstage area. In addition to setting page orientation, you can add a header and footer, gridlines, and row and column headings to your printout.
If you want to adjust your printout to have all rows or columns on one page, you can use the scaling options in the last option box in the Settings category.
You also can use the Header button and Footer button drop-down lists in the Header & Footer group to add predefined text to the selected header or footer area. Note that adding a header or a footer switches the workbook to Page Layout view. To return to Normal view, click in any cell, click the VIEW tab, and then click the Normal button in the Workbook Views group.
Navigation Tip: In Slide Show view, read the Checkpoint question and determine which answer is the correct answer. Click anywhere on the slide, and the correct answer will display in green with a green check mark beside it.
The table in this slide, which continues on the next slide, lists the tasks covered in this chapter.
The table in this slide, which continues from the previous slide, lists the tasks covered in this chapter.