Spreadsheets: Introducing MS Excel

Microsoft Excel (MS Excel or Excel) is one of the most used spreadsheet program or
application. A spreadsheet application is a program that helps you arrange data in rows
and columns (that is, a 2D (dimension) grid or table). The row and column intersect in a
cell which contains text, numbers, images and even formulas. Using the spreadsheet, you
are able to draw charts and diagrams from the data you entered.
[Another definition: A spreadsheet is a calculating tool that prepares a document, called a
worksheet, whose data is arranged in rows and columns.]
Excel can be used to store and analyze financial data, ledgers and scientific data (see
Weblabs on the Faculty's intranet website:http://fot/weblab for tutorial that employs
Excel to analyze microdevice I-V data ). Excel also has many mathematical and logical
functions and constructs that can be used in formulas on the data.
Getting to Excel
Excel is part of the Microsoft Office Suite which has other applications such Power Point,
Access, Front Page, Word.
You can start Excel in several ways:
1. Start-->Run and then type the command excel and that should bring up the
spreadsheet program.
2. Alternatively, you can use: Start-->Programs-->Microsoft Excel. This is the
MS Excel program's icon:
3. Double-clicking any Excel document with the icon:
application with that particular document as default.

will also open the

Besides the usual window components (close box, title bar, scroll bars, etc.) that we have
also found in MS Word, Notepad and other Windows applications, an Excel window has
several unique elements identified in the fig 1 below.

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Fig 1. Excel Interface

Each cell has an address or a unique name given to it implicitly by its location. That is,
the cell in the first row and column position is A1. By convention naming begins with
the column label which is a letter, followed by the row designator which is a number. See
fig.1 above.
Each Excel file is a workbook that can hold many worksheets. The worksheet is a grid
of columns (designated by letters) and rows (designated by numbers). The letters and
numbers of the columns and rows (called labels) are displayed in gray buttons across the
top and left side of the worksheet. By default, the worksheets are named sheet1, sheet2,
etc. You can rename them to suit your purpose. Use the worksheet tabs at the bottom of
the screen to navigate between worksheets within a workbook (see the bottom of fig1).

Standard Toolbar
The Standard toolbar, located beneath the menu bar, has buttons for commonly performed
tasks like adding a column of numbers, printing, sorting, and other operations. Excel let's
you customize the toolbar or even display multiple toolbars at the same time.
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Fig.2 The standard Toolbar

Formatting Toolbar
The Formatting toolbar, located beneath the Standard toolbar bar, has buttons for various
formatting operations like changing text size or style, formatting numbers and placing
borders around cells.

Fig.3 Formatting Toolbar

Formula bar
The formula bar is located beneath the toolbar at the top of the Excel worksheet. Use the
formula bar to enter and edit worksheet data. The contents of the active cell always
appear in the formula bar. When you click the mouse in the formula bar, an cross 'X' and
a check mark appear. You can click the check icon to confirm and completes editing, or
the 'X' to abandon editing.

Fig.4: The formula bar area

The Name box displays the address of the selected cell.
The active cell has a dark border around it to indicate your position in the worksheet. All
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text and numbers that you type are inserted into the active cell. Click the mouse on a cell
to make it active.
Using Excel
Adding Worksheets, Rows, and Columns
When you have lots of data, you achieve greater organization by using more than one
worksheet. For example, one worksheet may contain certain data for the month of
January, another worksheet, data for February, and so on.

Worksheets - Add a worksheet to a workbook by selecting Insert|Worksheet

from the menu bar.
Row - To add a row to a worksheet, select Insert|Rows from the menu bar, or
highlight the row by clicking on the row label, right-click with the mouse, and
choose Insert.
Column - Add a column by selecting Insert|Columns from the menu bar, or
highlight the column by click on the column label, right-click with the mouse, and
choose Insert.

Resizing Rows and Columns

Once a new work is opened, all the cells are the same size (fig.1). As in most cases, your
data fields will be longer then the default cell width and you need to resize the cells. You
may also want to use a font that is bigger than the default font (What is the default font?)
There are two ways to resize rows and columns.
1. Resize a row by dragging the line below the label of the row you would like to
resize. Resize a column in a similar manner by dragging the line to the right of
the label corresponding to the column you want to resize.
- OR 2. Click the row or column label and select Format|Row|Height or Format|
Column|Width from the menu bar to enter a numerical value for the height of the
row or width of the column.
Selecting Cells
Before a cell can be modified or formatted, it must first be selected (highlighted). Refer to
the table below for selecting groups of cells. You can use either the mouse or the
keyboard to do this.

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Cell Selection using the mouse
Cells to select Mouse action
One cell

click once in the cell

Entire row

click the row label

Entire column click the column label

Entire
worksheet
Cluster
cells

click the whole sheet button

of drag mouse over the cells or hold down the SHIFT key while
using the arrow keys

**To activate the contents of a cell, double-click on the cell or click once and press F2.
Moving and Copying Cells
Moving Cells
To cut cell contents that will be moved to another cell select Edit|Cut from
the menu bar or click the Cut button on the standard toolbar.
Copying Cells
To copy the cell contents, select Edit|Copy from the menu bar or click the
Copy button on the standard toolbar.
Pasting Cut and Copied Cells
Highlight the cell you want to paste the cut or copied content into and select
Edit|Paste from the menu bar or click the Paste button on the standard
toolbar.
Drag and Drop
If you are moving the cell contents only a short distance, the drag-and-drop
method may be easier. Simply drag the highlighted border of the selected cell
to the destination cell with the mouse.
Navigating the worksheet with keys
Movement

Key stroke

One cell up

up arrow key

One cell down

down arrow key or ENTER

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One cell left

left arrow key

One cell right

right arrow key or TAB

Top of the worksheet (cell A1)

CTRL+HOME

End of the worksheet (last cell

CTRL+END
containing data)
End of the row

CTRL+right arrow key

End of the column

CTRL+down arrow key

Formatting Cell Contents

Sometimes you may want to display some cells' contents in a different way, for example,
you may want the text to wrap. Let's look at what this means. Suppose you have written
a sentence in cell A1 as fig.5 below; notice that it is covering other cells yet you want it to
fit in only A1.

Fig. 5: Unwrapped text

To format cells' contents, highlight the cell(s) and then right-click the cell(s) to invoke the
pop-up menu (fig.6) from which you then select the Format Cells...

Fig.6: Excel Pop-up Menu

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On selecting the Format Cells... menu item, the Format Cell dialog window (fig. 7) will
be displayed and you can use it to enhance the appearance of your cell contents.

Fig.7 Format Cells Dialog

Note the various tabs in this dialog; Number, Alignment,Font, etc. These have
various uses which you should explore.
In our case, we want to have cell A1 contents wrap. So we select cell A1, bring up the
dialog and then click the Alignment tab to work on the positioning of the cell contents.
Under the Text Control sub-menu we click the checkbox that enables the Wrap Text
option. After we click OK and we note that cell A1 now appears as in fig.8 below:

Fig.8 Cell A1 contents now wrapping

You could also have stretched the row(s) in which these cells appear,to make them tall
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enough to have space for multiple lines of data.
Other special effects include font effects (much as in Word), alignments of cells (much as
in Word) recommended, for example, that column headers over columns of numeric
data be aligned right; fill color to give a background color to a cell, or column(s); etc.
Our Excel tutorials will focus on using formulas and charts to analyse and display
scientific data. It is up to you to explore other features of Excel as you deem fit
(However, that your knowledge of Excel will be examined).
Exercise 1:
Suppose you are entering data for a supermarket's sales on a given day. Create and
populate a sample Excel worksheet with sales for one day. Your worksheet should have
the column headings in fig. 9 below.

Fig. 9: Sample Supermarket sales in our Excel workbook

Your worksheet should have the following:
1. At least 25 rows of different supermarket items (fig.9 has only 5 rows)
2. You use a font of your choice but with the size of 14 and also bold.
3. The column headings should have a light green fill (fig.9 uses an orange fill)
4. Use the Format Cells dialog (fig.7) to format the cost figures to 3 decimal
places and align them to the right as in fig.9 above.
Assignment:
How can you get Excel to automatically generate the total cost for each item and then
also the grand sales total at the end of the sales column?

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