Excel Basics

Microsoft Excel is even more popular than Word. That's because of its easy initial interface. Nearly everyone I know who's jumped into Windows with no previous experience seems to favor Excel over Word.

It used to bug me that people used Excel for "word processing". I was a word processor when I started out with computers (on a mainframe), and a purist. Word was for word processing, Excel was an application for numbers and calculations, and that was that.

But I've evolved, and so have Word and Excel. Each of the applications grows closer to the other with each new iteration of Windows. You can crunch numbers in Word, and do a lot of word formatting in Excel. Plus, who am I to say what works for someone else?

Just keep one thing in the back of your mind: Excel was written as a spreadsheet program - so on its deepest level, it's about numbers - from simple addition all the way through to logarithms (and probably more).

OK, so let's say you just wanna jump in - here's a brief list of things to know..........

The interface is a grid. Creating things that are grid-like - lists, tables, charts, etc - will work well. The grid is made of rows and columns, and the intersection of a row and column is a cell.

Typing or entering text is fairly straightforward. Click on a cell and type.

If you type numbers, you'll need to format the cell. The command is Format, Cells, Numbers, Category. More on this command in the next Excel post.

That's really it. Have fun! You can't "break" Excel, and most mistakes can be fixed pretty easily.

If you have problems of any sort, leave a comment. I've led workshops on Excel to people who've never used a computer, so forget about questions seeming dumb or remedial - just ask.