While the default features of Microsoft Excel should be
enough in most scenarios, in some cases you will want more complex functionality
to perform advanced operations. To make this possible, Microsoft Excel is
accompanied by Microsoft Visual Basic, a programming environment that allows you
to use the Visual Basic language to enhance the usefulness and functionality of
a spreadsheet.
To use Microsoft Excel, you can launch like any regular
This would also start Microsoft Excel and
would open the document.
The classic way users launch Microsoft Excel is from the
When Microsoft Excel opens, it displays an interface
divided in various sections. The top section displays the
title bar which starts on the left side with the Office Button
 . If you position the mouse on it, a
tool tip would appear:
When clicked, the Office Button displays a menu:
As you can see, the menu of the Office Button allows
you to
perform the routine Windows operations of a regular application,
including
creating a new document, opening an existing file, or saving a document,
etc. If you right-click the office button, you would get a short
menu:
We will come back to the options on this menu.
The Quick Access Toolbar
is on the right side of the Office Button. It displays a few buttons.
If you right-click the Quick Access toolbar, a menu would appear:
To hide the Quick Access toolbar, you can
right-click it and click Remove Quick Access Toolbar. If you position the mouse
on a button, a tool tip would appear.
In the beginning, the Quick Access toolbar displays only three
buttons: Save, Undo, and Redo. If you want more buttons than that,
you can right-click the Quick Access toolbar and click Customize Quick Access
Toolbar... This would display the Excel Options dialog box:
To add a button to the Quick Access toolbar, on the left
list of Add, click an option and click Add. After making the selections, click
OK.
To remove a button from the Quick Access toolbar,
right-click it on the Quick Access toolbar and click Remove From Quick Access
Toolbar.
A button
with a down-pointing arrow displays on the right side of the Quick Access
toolbar. You can click or right-click that button to display its menu:
The role of this button is to manage some aspects of the top
section of the Microsoft Excel interface, including deciding what buttons
to display on the Quick Access toolbar. For example, instead of using the
Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu item as we saw previously, you can click an
option from that menu and its corresponding button would be added to the Quick Access
toolbar. If the options on the menu are nor enough, you can click either
Customize Quick Access Toolbar or More Commands... This would open the Excel Options dialog
box.
The main or middle area of the top section displays the name
of the application: Microsoft Excel. You can right-click the title bar to
display a menu that is managed by the operating system.
On the right side of the title bar, there are three system
buttons that allow you to minimize, maximize, restore, or close Microsoft
Access.
Under the title bar, there is another bar with a Help button
on the right side.
Under the title bar, Microsoft Excel displays the
Ribbon:
By default, the Ribbon displays completely in the top
section of Microsoft Excel under the title bar. One option is to show it the way
the main menu appeared in previous versions of Microsoft Excel. To do this:
This would display the Ribbon like a main menu:
To show the whole Ribbon again:
By default, the Quick Access toolbar displays on the title
bar and the Ribbon displays under it. If you want, you can switch their
locations. To do that, right-click the Office Button, the Quick Access toolbar,
or the Ribbon, and click Show Quick Access Toolbar Below the Ribbon:
To put them back to the default locations,
right-click the Office Button, the Quick Access toolbar, or the Ribbon, and
click Show Quick Access Toolbar Above the Ribbon.
The ribbon is a type of property sheet made of various
property pages. Each page is represented with a tab. To access a tab:
To identify each tab of the Ribbon, we will refer to them by
their names.
Each tab of the ribbon is divided
in various sections, each delimited by visible borders of vertical lines on the
left and right. Each section displays a title in its bottom side. In our
lessons, we will refer to each section by that title. For example, if the title
displays Font, we will call that section, "The Font Section".
Some sections of the Ribbon display a button
 .
If you see such a button, you can click it. This would open a dialog box or a
window.
Since there are various buttons and sometimes they are unpredictable, to know what a particular button is used for,
you can position your mouse on it and a tool tip would appear:
You can also use context sensitive help in some cases to get information about an
item.
You can add a button from a section of the Ribbon to the
Quick Access toolbar. To do that, right-click the button on the Ribbon and
click Add to Quick Access Toolbar:
Remember that, to remove a button from the Quick Access
toolbar, you can right-click it on the Quick Access toolbar and click Remove From Quick
Access Toolbar.
In some sections of the Ribbon, on the lower-right corner,
there is a button:
That button is used to display an intermediary dialog box
for some actions.
When Microsoft Excel is occupying a big area or the whole
area of the monitor, most buttons of the Ribbon appear with text. Sometimes you
may need to use only part of the screen. That is, you may need to narrow the
Microsoft Excel interface. If you do, some of the buttons may display part of
their appearance and some would display only an icon. Consider the difference in
the following three screenshots:
  
In this case, when you need to access an object, you can
still click it or click its arrow. If the item is supposed to have many objects,
a new window may appear and display those objects:
From this:
To this:
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Practical Learning: Starting Microsoft Excel
Under the Ribbon, there is a white box displaying a name like A1 (it may
not display A1...), that small box is called the Name Box:
On the right side of the Name box, there is a gray box with an
fx button. That fx button is called the Insert Function button.
On the right side of the Insert Function button is a long empty white box or section called the Formula
Bar:
You can hide or show the Formula Bar anytime. To do this, on
the Ribbon, click View. In the Show/Hide section:
Under the Name Box and the Formula bar, you see the column
headers. The columns are labeled A, B, C,
etc:
There are 255 of columns.
On the left side of the main window, there are small boxes called
row headers. Each row header is labeled with a number, starting at 1 on top, then 2, and so
on:
The main area of Microsoft Excel is made of cells. A cell is the intersection of a column and a
row:
A cell is identified by its name and every cell
has a name. By default, Microsoft Excel appends the name of a row to the
name of a column to identify a cell. Therefore, the
top-left cell is named A1. You can check the name of the cell in the
Name Box.
On the right side of the cells area, there is a vertical scroll bar that allows you to scroll up and down in case your
document cannot display everything at a time:
In the lower right section of the main window,
there is a horizontal scroll bar that allows you to scroll left and
right if your worksheet has more items than can be displayed all at
once:
Sometimes the horizontal scroll bar will appear too long
or too narrow for you. If you want, you can narrow or enlarge it. To do this,
click and drag the button on the left side of the horizontal scroll bar:
On the left side of the horizontal scrollbar, there are the worksheet
tabs:
By default, Microsoft Excel provides three worksheets to start with. You can work with any of them and switch to another at any
time by clicking its tab.
On the left side of the worksheet tabs, there are four navigation
buttons:
If you happen to use a lot of worksheets or the
worksheet names are using
too much space, which would result in some worksheets being hidden
under the horizontal scroll bar, you can use the navigation buttons to
move from one worksheet to another.
Under the navigation buttons and the worksheet tabs, the Status Bar provides a lot of information about the job that is going
on.
A Microsoft Excel file gets saved like any traditional Windows file. To save a
file:
Two issues are important. Whenever you decide to
save a file for the first time, you need to provide a file name and a
location. The file name helps the computer identify that particular file
and
register it.
A file name can consist of up to 255 characters, you
can include spaces and dashes in a name. Although there are many
characters you can use in a name (such as exclamation points, etc), try
to avoid fancy names. Give your
file a name that is easily recognizable, a little explicit. For example
such names as Time Sheets, Employee's Time Sheets, GlobalEX First
Invoice are explicit enough. Like any file of the Microsoft Windows
operating systems, a Microsoft Excel file has an extension, which is
.xls but you don't have to type it in the name.
The second important piece of information you should
pay attention to when saving your
file is the location. The location is the
drive and/or the folder where the file will be saved. By default,
Microsoft Excel saves its
files in the
My Documents folder. You can change that in the Save As dialog box. Just
click the arrow of the Save In combo box and select the folder you
want.
Microsoft Excel allows you to save its files in a type of your choice.
To save a file in another format:
There are other things you can do in the Save As dialog box:
You can save a file under a different name or
in another location, this gives you the ability to work on a copy of the
file while the original is intact.
There are two primary techniques you can use
to get a file in two names or the same file in two locations. When the
file is not being used by any application, in Windows Explorer (or in My
Computer, or in
My Network Places, locate the file, right-click it and choose
Copy. To save the file in a different name, right-click in the same
folder and choose Paste. The new file will be named Copy Of... You can
keep that name or rename the new file with a different name
(recommended). To save the
file in a different location, right-click in the appropriate
folder and click Paste; in this case, the file will keep its name.
In Microsoft Excel, you can use the Save As
dialog box to save a file in a different name or save the file with the
same name (or a different name) in another folder. The Save As dialog
box also allows you to create a new folder while you are saving your
file (you can even use this technique to create a folder from the
application even if you are not
saving it; all you have to do is create the folder, click OK to
register the folder, and click Cancel on the Save As dialog box).
The files you use could be created by you or someone else. They could be residing on your computer, on another
medium, or on a network. Once one of them is accessible, you can open it in your application.
You can open a document either by double-clicking
its icon in Windows Explorer, in My Computer, from the Find Files Or
Folders window, in
My Network Places, or by locating it in the Open dialog box. To access
the open dialog box, on the main menu, click File
-> Open... You can also click the Open button on the Standard
toolbar.
A shortcut to call the Open dialog box is Ctrl + O.
Every file has some characteristics, attributes, and features that make it unique; these are its properties.
You can access a file's properties from three main areas on the
computer:
A file's properties are used for various
reasons. For example, you can find out how much size the file is using,
where it is located (the hosting
drive and/or folder), who created the file, or who was the last
person to access or modify it. The Properties dialog box is also a good
place to leave messages to other users of the same
file, about anything, whether you work as a team or you simply want
to make yourself and other people aware of a particular issue regarding
the file.
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