Introduction to Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet application, which allows users to create, analyze, and organize data.
Excel is used by many businesses in their day-to-day operations and can utilize charts, graphs, data maps, pivot tables, pivot charts and macros.

This Excel tutorial is geared towards users that already have an understanding of how computers and Microsoft products work. It is also a very brief introduction into Excel and will only cover the basics of opening, identifying and moving around within a workbook. Excel is a large and sometimes complicated application and could not be covered in one tutorial or introduction. It is also best understood by the use of screenshots and graphics.

We begin by learning how to navigate through Excel and the different parts of an Excel Window.
The Excel program opens with a new blank document called a workbook and by default it contains three pages known as worksheets.

The main toolbars will look familiar to you because they are in all Microsoft applications. The menu bar and the standard toolbar are available as in other programs. The new toolbar that you may notice below the two main toolbars has a few sections we will go over. On this toolbar the first thing you see is a white box called the Name box. It will indicate which cell you have selected. By default it should contain A1 since we've just opened a blank workbook. Next to the name box are the formula editing buttons; a down arrow, a red X, a green checkmark, and the letters fx in italics. The long white box is called the formula bar, which is used to edit the contents of the cells without having to delete and re-enter all the data of a cell.