Excel for Beginners: The Screen, Cells and Your First Sheet

Excel is a program for working with tables of numbers and text. If you have ever kept a list of expenses in a notebook, written marks in rows and columns, or made a price list, you already understand what Excel is for. The difference is that Excel can add, count, sort, search and draw charts for you, instantly and without mistakes in the arithmetic. In nearly every office, shop, school, hospital and factory that uses computers, someone uses Excel. That is why job adverts for office, admin, accounts, sales support and data entry roles so often mention it.

This course uses one small shop's sales sheet from start to finish, so every lesson builds on the last. You can follow with any recent version of Microsoft Excel. The free Excel for the web, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc work almost the same for the basics, and small differences are mentioned where they matter. If your computer is a Mac, use the Cmd key wherever the lesson says Ctrl.

The parts of the screen

• Workbook and worksheet. The whole file is a workbook. Inside it are worksheets, also called sheets, shown as tabs at the bottom. A new workbook starts with one or more sheets, and you can add more with the plus button.
• Cells. The boxes in the grid. Each cell has an address made from its column letter and row number. The cell in column B and row 3 is B3.
• Rows and columns. Rows run across and are numbered 1, 2, 3. Columns run down and are lettered A, B, C. A sheet has over a million rows and more than sixteen thousand columns, far more than you will need.
• Range. A group of cells, written with a colon: A1:C5 means the block from A1 to C5.
• The formula bar. Above the grid. It shows what is really inside the selected cell. A cell may show 20150 while the formula bar shows =SUM(G2:G11).
• The ribbon. The tabs at the top (Home, Insert, Formulas, Data, View) with buttons grouped by task.
• The Name Box. To the left of the formula bar. It shows the selected cell's address, and you can type an address to jump there.

Your first sheet

Open a new blank workbook. Click cell A1 and type Date, then press Tab to move right and type Item, and so on. Press Enter to go down. In this way you can type a row of headings and then rows of data without touching the mouse. Type the following table, starting at A1. Leave the Amount column empty for now, because you will fill it with a formula in lesson 3.

   A          B          C       D     E       F       G
1  Date       Item       Region  Qty   Price   Staff   Amount
2  01-Jun     Notebook   North   10    120     Asha
3  01-Jun     Pen pack   South   25    80      Ben
4  02-Jun     Backpack   North   2     1400    Asha
5  03-Jun     Notebook   East    15    120     Chidi
6  03-Jun     Desk lamp  South   3     650     Ben
7  04-Jun     Mouse      East    4     700     Chidi
8  05-Jun     Pen pack   North   30    80      Asha
9  06-Jun     Backpack   South   1     1400    Ben
10 07-Jun     Notebook   South   20    120     Ben
11 08-Jun     Mouse      North   2     700     Asha

These ten rows are the sales of a small shop in the first week of June. Qty is how many were sold and Price is the price of one. We will use this table in all the lessons. Save the file now as shop-sales.xlsx using File, Save As, or press Ctrl+S. Choose a folder you can find again. Save often. Excel can lose work if your computer switches off, and while newer versions have AutoSave for files kept online, you should not rely on it.

Selecting and moving

• Click a cell to select it, or click and drag to select a range.
• Click a column letter or row number to select the entire column or row.
• Arrow keys move one cell. Ctrl+Arrow jumps to the end of a block of data, which is a huge time saver on long lists.
• Ctrl+Shift+Arrow selects from the current cell to the end of the block.
• Ctrl+A selects everything. Ctrl+Home goes to A1.
• Tab moves right, Shift+Tab moves left, and Enter moves down after typing.

Entering, changing and deleting

• Type into a cell and press Enter to store it.
• To change a cell, select it and press F2, or double-click it. Press Esc to cancel an edit.
• Press Delete to clear the contents of selected cells.
• To delete a whole row, right-click its number and choose Delete. To insert one, right-click and choose Insert.
• Ctrl+Z undoes the last action and Ctrl+Y redoes it. Do not be afraid to try things. Undo is your friend.

Copy, cut and paste

Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+X cuts and Ctrl+V pastes. Copying a cell with a formula adjusts it for the new position, which you will study in lesson 3. A small clipboard icon appears after pasting, and its options let you paste only values, only formats or only formulas. A very useful trick is Ctrl+D, which fills down. Select a cell with data and the cells below it, press Ctrl+D, and the top cell is copied into all of them.

Rename and add sheets

Double-click a sheet tab to rename it, for example to Sales. Right-click a tab to move, copy, delete or colour it. Give sheets clear names. Months or purposes such as Jan, Feb and Summary are much easier to understand than Sheet1 and Sheet2.

Two habits that make you look professional

1. One table, one purpose. Put headings in the first row, data underneath, no empty rows or columns inside the table, and no merged cells in the data area. Tools like sorting, filtering and pivot tables need this tidy shape.
2. Never type a number as text with letters mixed in. Write 120, not Rs. 120 or 120 rupees in the same cell. You can show currency symbols with formatting (lesson 2). Text in a number column breaks the arithmetic.

What you can do with Excel at work

• Lists: attendance, stock, customers, tasks, contacts.
• Calculations: totals, averages, percentages, GST or VAT, commission and discounts.
• Reports: monthly sales, expenses, marks, production counts.
• Checking: finding duplicates, missing values and mistakes in data.
• Charts: turning numbers into a picture for a manager.

Your task

1. Create the workbook and type the sales table into A1:F11. Save it as shop-sales.xlsx.
2. Rename the sheet to Sales.
3. Practise: jump to the end of the table with Ctrl+Down, return with Ctrl+Home, and select the whole Qty column data with Ctrl+Shift+Down.
4. Change the Mouse price in F7 to 750, check it in the formula bar, then undo it with Ctrl+Z.

How to check it worked

• The table fills A1:F11, with headings in row 1 and ten rows of data.
• You can say the address of the cell holding Backpack in the first Backpack row: B4.
• The file is saved, and you know where.