Introduction To MS Excel

Introduction to MS Excel

MS Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program that is easy to use and allows you to manipulate, organize, and visualize your data. It’s a very widely applied spreadsheet in all over the world.

Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets,[3] using a grid of cells arranged in numbered rows and letter-named columns to organize data manipulations like arithmetic operations. it can display data as line graphs, histograms and charts, and with a very limited three-dimensional graphical display. an Excel application can automatically poll external databases and measuring instruments using an update schedule,[11] analyze the results, make a Word report or PowerPoint slide show, and e-mail these presentations on a regular basis to a list of participants.

Ms Excel has many features and specifications.

Excel supports charts, graphs, or histograms generated from specified groups of cells. The generated graphic component can either be embedded within the current sheet, or added as a separate object.

Basic Layout of ms excel is:

There are 5 important areas in the screen.

1. Quick Access Toolbar: This is a place where all the important tools can be placed. When you start Excel for the very first time, it has only 3 icons (Save, Undo, Redo). But you can add any feature of Excel to to Quick Access Toolbar so that you can easily access it from anywhere (hence the name).

2. Ribbon: Ribbon is like an expanded menu. It depicts all the features of Excel in easy to understand form. Since Excel has 1000s of features, they are grouped in to several ribbons. The most important ribbons are – Home, Insert, Formulas, Page Layout & Data.

3. Formula Bar: This is where any calculations or formulas you write will appear. You will understand the relevance of it once you start building formulas.

4. Spreadsheet Grid: This is where all your numbers, data, charts & drawings will go. Each Excel file can contain several sheets. But the spreadsheet grid shows few rows & columns of active spreadsheet. To see more rows or columns you can use the scroll bars to the left or at bottom. If you want to access other sheets, just click on the sheet name (or use the shortcut CTRL+Page Up or CTRL+Page Down).

5. Status bar: This tells us what is going on with Excel at any time. You can tell if Excel is busy calculating a formula, creating a pivot report or recording a macro by just looking at the status bar. The status bar also shows quick summaries of selected cells (count, sum, average, minimum or maximum values). You can change this by right clicking on it and choosing which summaries to show.

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