Basics of MS Office Excel:

Basics of MS Office Excel

Microsoft has developed so many amazing tools, we are aware of, and one of the most used tool in the world is Microsoft Office also known as MS Office. In this tool you find some of the amazing products which help you to work on many aspects of corporate working, like from making a presentation to analysis of the data etc. MS office includes MS Office Access, MS office Excel, MS office Groove, MS office InfoPath, MS office OneNote, MS office Outlook, MS office PowerPoint, MS office Publisher & MS office Word. Every tool has its own importance and problems solving abilities which any working individual faces in his/her life. Each one of them have some unique quality but today I am not going to discuss them all rather, Out of all these let me tell you that “MS office Excel” is the most used tool in everyday’s life. It doesn’t matter if you are a kid study in school or college or fresher or professional, we all have faced the beauty of excel in our daily working.

I am not wrong, if I say that MS Excel is pervasive in our working life, reason it help us to solve more than 70% of work on Excel in a way like managing huge data, calculations, analysis of data, making presentable data etc. This list may go on with lots of bullet points; I will discuss some of the very basic yet most important functions of MS office Excel. If you know them it’s great and starts exploring the advance version of the same. But if you get stuck with the initial use of excel this article will helps you to deal with the situation. Excel is not so small that we can sum up all its functions in one single article, so I am limiting myself to the basics first and we definitely moves to advance version once we learn the basics.

Get for the information a single Excel file contains 1048576 rows & 16384 columns, the range of columns are from A to XFD. Here in this article I am going to discuss some of the very important functions and features of excel.

If we open excel we see headings i.e.  HOME, INSERT, PAGE LAYOUT, FORMULAS, DATA, REVIEW & VIEW. There are many functions which are same as we used in MS Office Word. In each heading there are lots of functions which help us to make our data presentable, easy to analyze it and easy to calculate etc. let’s take each head one by one in brief:

1.       HOME:  functions with shortcut keys:

Ø  Inserting New Sheet: For this the icon is given at the left bottom of the excel sheet (sheet1, sheet2, sheet3, next to it is the icon just you have to click. (Shift+F11)

Ø  Copy: we can copy the selected data by this function. (Ctrl+C)

Ø  Paste: we can paste the copied data with this. (Ctrl+P)

Ø  Cut: we can cut and paste the selected. (Ctrl+X)

Ø  Save: To save the data you can click on the floppy icon or use (Ctrl+S)

Ø  Undo: It helps to bring back the information you typed and deleted by mistake  (Ctrl+Z)

Ø  B: we can highlight the data as bold with the function. (Ctrl+B)

Ø  I: it can highlight the selected data in “Italics”. (Ctrl+I)

Ø  Border: By this one can put borders on the cells.

Ø  Fill Color: It help to fill color in background of the text.

Ø  Font Color: By this one can color the font of the content.

Ø  Alignment: You can change the alignment of the selected content in top, middle & bottom alignment. And also you can align the content in right, centre and left of the cell. Along with this you can increase or decrease the margins of the cell (Alt+Ctrl+shift+Tab, Ctrl+Alt+Tab). By other two icons you can increase or decrease the Indent.

Ø  Wrap Text: with this we can make visible the whole content of the cell.

Ø  Merge & Centre: It merges two or more cells and put the content in the centre.

Ø  General: Choose how the values of the cell are displayed like in percentage, currency, date& time etc.

Ø   ($,%, , , .0 .00, .00 .0):

·         $ Sign shows the value in currencies you want to show.

·         % gives value of cell in percentage value.

·         (,):  shows the value of cells value with a thousand separator.

·         .0 .00: It shows more precise value by increasing decimal places.

·         .00 .0: It shows less precise values by showing less decimal place.

Ø  Conditional formatting: It highlights the particular cell, value and data.

Ø  Format as table: Quickly format a range of cells and convert it to a table by choosing a predefined table style.

Ø  Cell styles: It quickly formats the cell by choosing from the predefined style and made customized changes as well.

Ø  Insert: Insert cell, row, column, table or sheet.

Ø  Delete: It deletes the data from cells, rows, columns, and sheet.

Ø  Format: It allows you to make lots of changes with your cell, sheet, column, and protect and hide the cells etc like change in row height or column width etc.

Ø  AutoSum: This tab do auto sum of selected data, average, count numbers, min, max etc.

Ø  Fill: you can fill in up, down, right, and left or justify the data in cell.

Ø  Clear: It clears everything from cell, sheet and comment.

Ø  Sort & Filter: it helps to arrange the data in ascending or descending order which help to analyze data easily.

Ø  F2+Enter: With this key you can check the formula you have applied in the cell.

2.       INSERT:

In Insert tab you can insert a Pivot table, Table, Picture, ClipArt, Shapes, Smart Art, Column, Lines, Pie, Bars, Area, Scatter, and Other Charts with so many options inside each icon. You can hyperlink any information by clicking on the hyperlink tab. Further, you can add workbook to your sheet, header & footer to your sheet use different types of word Arts to decorate the data and add signature line as well. And if you want to add some item outside from sheet you can use object icon, Symbol icon is used to insert the symbols which are not in the excel.

3.       Page Layout:

As the name of heading suggests you gets lot of features to make editing with page and make its customized in the way you want to make visible the same for others. All terms are self explanatory in this tab.

  

4.       FORMULAS:

In this head you can apply various formulas which you want to use. In this basic version you can do Addition, Subtraction, Division, Multiplication, and can checks errors etc. below are some of the examples of the formula you can use in the sheet:

1.       Addition:  =A1+A2+A3, or use function as:  =sum(A1:A7)

2.       Multiplication: =F1*J8

3.       Division: =A1/C1

4.       Subtraction: =A1-G1

These are some of the basic functions we usually use in excel, which are helpful for the beginners who can use excel with ease with help of this article. For advance version of excel I will write the separate article. Hope this information about excel is helpful.