Week 9 Clear

Many students are quite intimidated by Microsoft Excel. Although most students are very skilled in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint, there seems to be a disconnect from when we are very young with Excel. I think the biggest problem is that Powerpoint and Word are used in school projects when we are even in grade school; Excel is used for financial bookkeeping for the most part, which, unless you're a child prodigy, most of us don't use as a child.

One of the biggest obstacles of Excel is learning the basics. Let's start there. Excel is chock full of rows and columns. These rows and columns meet at specific cells where we can input numeric or textual information. Columns are labeled with letters and are the vertical categories; there are currently 16,384 columns per sheet. Rows are numbered and are organized horizontally; there are 6500 rows in Excel 2003 and 1,048,576 in Excel 2007 per sheet. An Excel document can have multiple sheets which can even extract information from one sheet to formulate or populate the other.

Each cell is addressed with a column letter followed by a row number. For example the first cell in every spreadsheet is A1. The column or letter is always first. Sometimes you may have thousands of cells within a given spreadsheet you are working with. In this case, it is helpful to know some shortcuts to navigate such a large document. Some keyboard shortcuts to move to the very end of cells are listed here:

CTRL and the down arrow

END and down arrow

CRTL and END

Additionally, it is important to know how to quickly get to the top of a spreadsheet instead of scrolling up and across. A shortcut to implement this is CTRL and Home. This will bring you directly to A1. Along with shortcuts comes organization; in order to properly organize a Excel document that has multiple sheets being used, it is important to rename worksheets based on the information in each folder. To do this, simply double-click on the sheet tab on the bottom of the screen and type in any title.

Once you've gotten used to some of these techniques, you're ready for more advanced Excel techniques such as cell input. Data inputs into Excel as a numeric value is always right justified and text input is always left justified. Sometimes it is crucial to have numeric values that are left justified, but the user must force the cell to record the input as text data. To do this place a ' or single quote in front of the numeric value. To add a new row/column or delete an existing one, highlight a specific cell, right click and from the drop down menu press "insert... entire row/column." To adjust a column's width, yet another important trick to display all information in a given column, place the cursor on the line in between the two columns and drag to the specific size wanted.

These are the how-to basics of Microsoft Excel. The best way to get the hang of it is to practice, practice, practice. Excel skills are highly important upon graduating college as many jobs in the U.S. rely heavily on spreadsheets in virtually every field from finance to engineering to retail. Getting a good grasp on Excel now will give you a great competitive advantage while you look for jobs as well as in the workforce during your first job. For more information visit this helpful site.