What is a spreadsheet good for? A spreadsheet is an online version of an accountant's worksheet, which can automatically do most of the calculating (and recalculating) for you. You can do budgets, analyze data, generate sorted lists, or keep track of your grades and GPA (just to make sure the administration's version matches what you get from your professors).

Creating or Opening Workbooks

To create a new Excel workbook or to open an existing workbook, click on "File" in the menu and click the icon for the full list of options. Or, click on the "new" or "open" icons on the standard toolbar. If you select to open an existing workbook, you will get a navigation menu to select the file you want to open. Note under the "File" menu, you can also press the "Control" and "N" keys at the same time to create a New workbook, or "Control" and "O" for the menu to select an existing file to open.

When you open Excel, a new "workbook" is created for you. A workbook is a set of "worksheets." A worksheet is a "page" in your workbook. Excel allows you to quickly switch between different worksheets in a workbook, and between different open workbooks.

When you create a new workbook in Excel, you get three worksheets in the new workbook, but you can add many more worksheets to a workbook if you need them (up to 255).

Here's what you get when you open Excel:

menu bar toolbars name box / formula bar
top worksheet in a new, blank workbook (with default name: Book1)
sheet selector status bar

Menu bar

The menu bar opens menus from which you can select to perform any possible function in Excel.

Click on a menu item, e.g. "Format," to open a drop down menu of all the format options. Some items in the menu, e.g. "Row," will open another menu with further options. Other items, e.g. "Cells," list a shortcut (press the Control key and the 1 key at the same time) to select an option without having to use the Menu bar. It is a good idea to remember shortcuts for functions you commonly perform.

Toolbar

There are many tool bars available in Excel which allow you to choose a particular function with a click of the mouse, saving you the time of searching through the menu of all options. When you open Excel, the Standard toolbar and the Format toolbar are available at the top of the screen:

Standard toolbar
Format toolbar

These two toolbars include the most commonly used operations, such as opening, saving, or printing a file, copying and pasting, and formatting text.

In addition to these toolbars, Excel offers the option of displaying several more toolbars, covering such options as creating charts, drawing, and forms. You can display or hide any of the available toolbars as desired.

To display or hide toolbars, select "View" from the menu, then "Toolbars," to see a list of all available toolbars. Click to add a check beside the name of the toolbars you want to display, or remove the check to hide a toolbar.

Name Box / Formula Bar

The name box indicates the currently active cell. The formula bar (the area after the "=") indicates the contents of the cell. In this case, there is nothing in cell A1, so the formula bar is empty.

Sheet selector

Click on a tab to pull a worksheet to the front to work on it.

Adding, Naming, or Deleting Worksheets

When you create a new workbook, the default is to include 3 worksheets. To add more worksheets, click "Insert" on the menu bar, and select to insert a "Worksheet." Note that the tab for Sheet 4 in the Sheet Selector is added on the left. To move a sheet tab, click on the tab and drag it to a new location.

To rename a sheet, double click on the tab and enter the new name to overwrite the previous name (e.g. "Budget" to replace "Sheet 1").

To delete a worksheet, click the worksheet's tab to select it. Then click "Edit" on the menu bar, and select to "Delete Sheet."

Status bar

The status bar provides information about a command or operation in process, and indicates such things as whether the 'caps lock' or 'number lock' functions are on.

Saving and Printing Your Work

Don't forget to save your work often, especially if you are creating a long, involved workbook. Click on "File" in the menu bar to save or print your work. The first time you save a workbook, you will need to give it a name. If you want to change the name later, or if you want to keep the old version in the old name and create a new version with a new name, use the "Save As" feature: this will create a duplicate file and save it under a new name. Your old file with the old name will still be there, and you will now be working in the new file with the new name. If you want to see what a printout will look like before you actually print something, use the "Print Preview" feature. You can edit things based on what you see in the print preview so that it will print the way you want it to look. Selecting to "Print" brings up a menu of options to print the whole workbook, one sheet, or just a selected area of a sheet. You can save or print files using the icons on the standard toolbar, but the "Print" icon defaults to printing all and only the active worksheet.

Next: Entering Data