Part 1 AL Getting to Know Excel 2007 CO PY RI GH TE D MA TE RI With Microsoft’s popular Excel 2007 spreadsheet program, you can enter, manipulate, and analyze data in ways that would be impossible, cumbersome, or error prone for you to do manually. This part gives you the basics you need to get up and running quickly in Excel. In this part . . .
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Excel Basics Excel documents are known as workbooks. A single workbook can store as many sheets as will fit into memory, and these sheets are stacked like the pages in a notebook. Sheets can be either worksheets (a normal spreadsheet-type sheet with rows and columns) or chart sheets (a special sheet that holds a single chart). Most of the time, you perform tasks in worksheets.
Excel Basics — Familiarizing Yourself with the Excel 2007 Window 3 Formulas can use normal arithmetic operators such as + (plus), — (minus), * (multiply), and / (divide). They can also use special built-in functions that let you do powerful things without much effort on your part. For example, Excel has functions that add a range of values, calculate square roots, compute loan payments, and even tell you the time of day. Part 5 covers how to use the various functions in Excel.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Double-click the Office button. See “Introducing the Office Menu,” later in this part. Press the Alt key, then press F, and then press X.
Familiarizing Yourself with the Excel 2007 Window — Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard 5 Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard The mouse is the primary tool that you use in Excel for executing commands, making selections, and navigating in the worksheet. Following are the mouse conventions that we use in this book: Click: Click the left mouse button once. Double-click: Click the left mouse button twice in quick succession. It may take you some time to get the hang of this action.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 For your convenience, Excel 2007 adds a mini-toolbar above the contextual menu with useful commands drawn from the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 1-2. See also “Introducing the Ribbon,” later in this part. Figure 1-2 Using the keyboard Most users will be comfortable using the mouse to do all their work in Excel.
Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard Shortcut Action Ctrl+F Find Ctrl+G or F5 Go To Ctrl+H Replace Ctrl+I Apply or remove italic formatting Ctrl+O or Ctrl+F12 Open a document Ctrl+P Print Ctrl+S or Shift+F12 Save Ctrl+U Apply or remove underlining Ctrl+V Paste Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4 Close the active workbook Crtl+X Cut Ctrl+Y or F4 Repeat the last action Ctrl+Z Undo the last action F1 Display the help viewer Ctrl+F1 Hide or display the Ribbon commands F2 Enable editing within
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Keys Action Ctrl+Home Moves the active cell to the beginning of worksheet (A1) F5 Displays the Go To dialog box Ctrl+Backspace Scrolls the screen to display the active cell Up arrow* Scrolls the screen one row up (active cell doesn’t change) Down arrow* Scrolls the screen one row down (active cell doesn’t change) Left arrow* Scrolls the screen one column left (active cell doesn’t change) Right arrow* Scrolls the screen one column right (active cell doesn
Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard — Introducing the Ribbon 9 Most buttons execute commands directly when you click them. However, some buttons have a built-in downward-pointing arrow, and others have an attached downward-pointing arrow. Clicking a button with a built-in arrow displays a menu or gallery. For a button with an attached arrow (known as a split button), the icon part of the button represents the most common command for the button.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Help button: On the far right of the Ribbon is the help button (the question mark). Click this button for general Excel help. Menu, rich: Rich menus are new in Excel 2007. Each menu choice has an illustrative graphic, the command name, and in some cases a short description of what the command does. Don’t confuse rich menus with drop-down galleries, although they look similar. Menus contain related commands.
Introducing the Ribbon 11 Tab, standard: The Ribbon comes with a set of standard tabs, each organized according to the functions of the commands that it contains. For example, the Insert tab contains command groups to insert shapes, charts, tables, pictures, and so on. An exception is the Home tab, which is so-named because this is where you do most of your work in Excel.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Tipping off your keyboard Excel provides a feature called KeyTips that allow you to access every command on the Ribbon using the keyboard, without having to memorize keystroke combinations! So, what are KeyTips? KeyTips are little alphanumerical indicators containing a single letter, a combination of two letters, or a number, indicating what to type to activate the command under them, as shown in Figure 1-5.
Introducing the Ribbon — Introducing the Quick Access Toolbar 13 Right-click in the Ribbon area and choose Minimize the Ribbon from the contextual menu Click the arrow to the right of the Quick Access toolbar and choose Minimize the Ribbon from the menu If you click a tab after you hide the Ribbon commands, Excel displays the tab commands temporarily. The command display is hidden again after you select a command in the tab or click away from the Ribbon area.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Follow these steps to remove a command (including the default commands) from the toolbar: 1. Right-click the command you want to remove from the toolbar. 2. Choose Remove from Quick Access Toolbar in the menu that appears. If you think you’ll be adding a lot of commands to the Quick Access toolbar, it’s a good idea to move the toolbar from the title bar to a separate location below the Ribbon.
Introducing the Quick Access Toolbar — Formatting with Themes 15 The menu is divided into two sections. The left section contains a list of documentrelated commands. By default, the right section displays a list of recently used documents. Click a document name in the list to open the file. Click a pushpin to the right of a document name to keep the document on the list permanently. By default, Excel lists 17 documents, which get overridden with new documents unless you use the pushpin control.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 Excel applies a default theme to all new workbooks along with a theme gallery so that you can change the default theme. After you select a new theme, all galleries and all the elements in your workbook formatted with theme styles change to match the new theme. Following is a description of the three parts of a theme: Theme font: A theme uses two complementary fonts — a header font and a body font. All elements using themed styles thus use the same font or fonts.
Formatting with Themes — Soliciting Help 17 You can change the theme in a workbook by clicking the Themes button in the Ribbon’s Page Layout tab and selecting a new theme from the gallery that appears. Remember: The three Microsoft Office applications — Excel 2007, Word 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 — share the same themes. If you create reports that combine elements from each application, your reports will have a consistent look if you use a common theme.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 When you use contextual help or general help, Excel displays the help viewer, shown in Figure 1-9. The viewer sports Internet browser-style controls. In fact, it was built using the same technology that Microsoft uses in its Internet Explorer browser application. Of course, the viewer is not a full-fledged browser because you can view only Excel help content.
Soliciting Help 19 The major features of the help viewer follow: Search box: You can enter specific search text in this box. The viewer stores a list of your text searches for the current help session. Click the drop-down arrow on the side of the box to view and select an item from the list if you want to review a previous search result. Search button: Click the Search button (or press Enter) to initiate a search after you enter the search text in the search box.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2007 TOC (Table of Contents) button: Click this button to display a Table of Contents pane on the left side of the help viewer. The pane displays the same list of topics that the main windows displays after you select general help or click the Home button. Clicking a main topic in the pane displays a list of subtopics, similar to the subtopics that the main windows displays after you click a general help topic link.
