If the job in hand requires lot of lists, tables, financial calculations, analysis and graphs, Excel is just the package for you. Excel is great at organizing all types of data, but it is the numerical data where Excel is in its home turf. Since most of the times you not only need a tool for storing and managing data but also analyzing and querying data, Excel’s powerful features help you do all this, and  more. In case you have used MS Word (which is part of the same MS Office bundle suite), you would notice the striking similarity between the two packages. The menus, toolbars and icons are very similar (though not same, after all if all of them were same, why you would need two different packages!) to each other. This is keeping in line with Microsoft’s much hyped philosophy and strategy of totally integrated office suite pack. From user point of view, this means less time spent in learning the second package, once you know the first and almost effortless and seamless exchange of data between various components. However, if you have not used MS Word before you need not worry.

Excel, or for that matter any spreadsheet, essentially comprises of a grid of rows and columns. Intersection of row and column is called a cell. Typically, rows are numbered numerically, i.e. 1, 2, 3… and so on, and columns are labeled alphabetically, i.e. A, B, C… and so on. Of course columns do not end at Z, after they start AA, AB, AC… and then BA, BB, BC… and so on.

Each spreadsheet contains 16384 rows and 256 columns. That makes 4, 194, 304 cells (16384*256), each holding either text or numbers or formulas. And this not all, each workbook can contain 16 or more such worksheets (limited only by your computer’s memory and storage capacity!) Sounds huge, isn’t it! Well actually it is. I certainly hope that you do not deal with data volumes larger than this, and if you do, you have chosen the wrong package.

Here I would like to add a word of caution. Though each worksheet comes with over 4 million cells and you are given 16 (you can have even more) such worksheets in each workbook (adding to more than 67 million cell!), in actual practice you run out of memory much before you exhaust all the cells. You will notice that even after your tables are longer than six or seven hundred rows and fifteen or twenty columns wide, your computer would seem to go into a “drowsy mode” i.e. each time you do any operation like save or open or even update a file, it would take many ‘light seconds’ more than usual (don’t forget that the speed of most personal computers is measured in Million Instructions Per Second – MIPS conversely, the delay should also be measured in ‘light seconds’!). It is therefore desirable that you do not plan very huge spreadsheets (unless somebody has gifted you 128 MB RAM memory Modules!)

In spite of these impressive numbers, the real power of Excel lies not only in this, but in its cool graphical user interface and user friendliness, even while doing some very sophisticated tasks.

As usual with other MS Office packages, there is more than one way to do the same thing.

You can start Excel either by clicking at   from the Office Shortcut Bar or choosing Microsoft Excel from Programs option from start button.

NAVIGATION:

To move around the spreadsheet either use the keyboard keys ↑for going up, ↓ for going down, ←for going left, → for going right, Page up for going one screen up, Page down for going one screen down, and other related keys; or use mouse to traverse the different parts of the worksheet through scroll bars. You can also type the desired cell address directly in the Address name box to randomly go anywhere in the worksheet.

SELECTING CELLS:

Before entering, editing or formatting cells, they need to be selected. You can select a single cell, or a group of continuous cells or even a discontinuous group of cells. This selection is called range.

SELECTING CELLS WITH MOUSE:

1. To select a single cell, simply point and click on it to make it active.
2. Click on a row number to select the entire row.
3. Click on column alphabet to select the entire column.
4. Click and drag to select a range of cells.
5. Click on the empty button at the intersection of the column and row numbers to select the entire worksheet.

ENTERING AND EDITING TEXT:

To enter any text, simply active any cell by clicking on it (and making it an active cell) and start typing. Press Enter to conclude entry. As you start typing, text would appear in the active cell and in the formula bar. If you make mistake while typing and before pressing Enter, simply press Backspace key to erase the present contents and type the correct text. If you notice an error after finishing the entry, activate the relevant cell and press F2 function key. The current contents of the cell would be displayed in the formula bar, now you can correct the entry and press Enter to conclude.

If you wish to replace the entire text, activate the relevant cell and simply type the new text. The new text would be automatically replace the old text.