Datasheet
What to do in the Worksheet area
The Worksheet area is where most of the Excel spreadsheet action takes
place because it’s the place that displays the cells in different sections of the
current worksheet and it’s right inside the cells that you do all your spread-
sheet data entry and formatting, not to mention a great deal of your editing.
Keep in mind that in order for you to be able to enter or edit data in a cell,
that cell must be current. Excel indicates that a cell is current in three ways:
The cell cursor — the dark black border surrounding the cell’s entire
perimeter — appears in the cell
The address of the cell appears in the Name box of the Formula bar
The cell’s column letter(s) and row number are shaded (in a kind of a
beige color on most monitors) in the column headings and row headings
that appear at the top and left of the Worksheet area, respectively
Moving around the worksheet
An Excel worksheet contains far too many columns and rows for all of a
worksheet’s cells to be displayed at one time regardless of how large your
personal computer monitor screen is or how high the screen resolution.
(After all, we’re talking 17,179,869,184 cells total!) Excel therefore offers many
methods for moving the cell cursor around the worksheet to the cell where
you want to enter new data or edit existing data:
Click the desired cell — assuming that the cell is displayed within the
section of the sheet currently visible in the Worksheet area
Click the Name box, type the address of the desired cell directly into this
box and then press the Enter key
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Part I: Getting In on the Ground Floor
How you assign 26 letters to 16,384 columns
When it comes to labeling the 16,384 columns of
an Excel 2007 worksheet, our alphabet with its
measly 26 letters is simply not up to the task. To
make up the difference, Excel first doubles the
letters in the cell’s column reference so that
column AA follows column Z (after which you
find column AB, AC, and so on) and then triples
them so that column AAA follows column ZZ
(after which you get column AAB, AAC, and the
like). At the end of this letter tripling, the 16,384th
and last column of the worksheet ends up being
XFD so that the last cell in the 1,048,576th row
has the cell address XFD1048576.
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