Introduction to Microsoft Excel

By Stephen Bucaro

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application used to perform financial calculations, statistical analysis, and other mathematical operations. A spreadsheet is an interactive program that displays rows and columns. Using a spreadsheet, you can manipulate and analyze data in ways that would be difficult to do manually.

Excel files are known as "workbooks". A workbook consists of "sheets", each of which contain 256 columns labeled from A to IV (the letters IV, not Roman numeral 4) and 65,536 rows numbered from 1 to 65,536.

The intersection of a row and a column is called a "cell". 256 columns x 65,536 rows gives you 16,777,216 cells per sheet. A workbook can have as many sheets as your computer can store in memory. A cell can hold text, a number, a formula, or it can hold nothing at all.

Each cell has an address, which is the column row location of the cell. For example the address of the cell in the upper-left corner of a worksheet is A1. The address of the cell in the sixth column and the tenth row is F10. The address of the cell at the farthest lower-right corner of a worksheet is IV65536.

Lets create a simple example spreadsheet

To open Excel, select Start | All programs | Microsoft Office | Microsoft Excel. The Excel program window appears. When you open Excel, by default it creates a blank workbook named "Book1".

A worksheet always has one active cell. The active cell is the one that is currently selected and has a thick border. The contents of the active cell is displayed in the "Formula Bar" located just above the column headings. When you first open Excel, the active cell is A1.