Part 1 AL Getting to Know Excel 2010 CO PY RI GH TE D MA TE RI With Microsoft’s popular Excel 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 2010 Excel 2010 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. Each worksheet uses a grid with 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns.
Excel 2010 Basics — Familiarizing Yourself with the Excel 2010 Window 3 Active cell and ranges In Excel, one of the cells in a worksheet is always the active cell. The active cell is the one that’s selected, and it’s displayed with a thicker border than the others. Its contents appear in the formula bar. You can select a group, or range, of cells by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer over them. You can then issue a command that does something to the active cell or to the range.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 Select all button Control button Control button Mouse pointer Formula bar Name box Help Excel title bar Quick Access toolbar Active cell pointer Split box Close Workbook title bar Column header Maximize/Restore Workbook window Minimize Figure 1-1 Sheet tabs Row header Status bar New sheet tab Tab scrolling controls Ribbon Tab split Zoom controls Scroll bar Split box Normal view Page break preview Page layout view Window resize handles
Familiarizing Yourself with the Excel 2010 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. ✓ Right-click: Click the right mouse button once.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 Figure 1-2 Using the keyboard Most users will be comfortable using the mouse to do all their work in Excel. For users who prefer to use the keyboard exclusively when working in Windows applications or for users who prefer to split the use of the mouse and keyboard among various tasks, Excel provides the following solutions: ✓ Keyboard shortcuts ✓ Keyboard navigation ✓ KeyTips The first two functions are described next.
Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard Shortcut Action 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 the active cell 7 With more than
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 Keys Action 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’t change) * With Scroll Lock on Introducing the Ribbon Excel comes with a user interface called the R
Navigating with the Mouse and Keyboard — Introducing the Ribbon 9 arrow (known as a split button), the icon or text part of the button represents the most common command for the button. Clicking the arrow part displays a menu or gallery with additional commands or formatting choices.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 ✓ Menu, rich: Rich menus have illustrative graphics, the command name, and in some cases a short description of what the command does. Remember: Don’t confuse rich menus with drop-down galleries, although they look similar. Menus contain related commands. Galleries allow you to choose from among a set of formats or layouts.
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 2010 It is important to note that at each stage of downward resizing, no command groups or commands disappear entirely from the Ribbon. The multiple layout options for the command groups ensure that nothing is lost as space becomes more limited. If you reduce the size of the Excel window sufficiently, however, the Ribbon disappears altogether.
Introducing the Ribbon — Introducing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) 13 ✓ Click the Ribbon’s Minimize button in the Excel title bar (to the left of the help button) ✓ Press Ctrl+F1 ✓ Double-click any Ribbon tab ✓ Right-click in the Ribbon area and choose Minimize the Ribbon from the contextual menu After you hide the commands, only the Ribbon tabs are displayed. If you click a tab after you hide the Ribbon commands, Excel displays the tab commands temporarily.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 You can add an entire Ribbon command group to the QAT. Just right-click an area in the command group name (for example, Font) and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar. 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.
Introducing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) — Previewing Your Formatting Live 15 Figure 1-7 The Backstage navigation pane includes an Options button, which gives you access to various Excel options. We encourage you to visit the options from time to time because you may find useful application, workbook, or worksheet options that you want to turn on or off.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 is not what you wanted, and then committing to another option, only to realize that you don’t like the new result either, and so on. You find Live Preview options throughout Excel in places where formatting alternatives are available — most notably in galleries. Remember: Live Preview formatting is not universal in Excel. Some elements provide formatting alternatives but do not have Live Preview support.
Previewing Your Formatting Live — Soliciting Help 17 The following are characteristics of theme colors: • The top row in a color picker displays the base theme colors, and the next five rows display various tints and shades of the base colors. Below the theme colors are standard colors that do not change if the theme is changed. If you want to apply specific formatting that doesn’t change after you change the theme, use a standard color.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 SuperTips take the concept a step further by adding a short description explaining the purpose of the command. Some SuperTips include an explanatory graphic when a text description is insufficient to explain the meaning of the command. SuperTips are available for all commands on the Ribbon. In many cases, the SuperTip explanation provides enough information so you don’t have to seek additional help.
Soliciting Help 19 Figure 1-9 Although most of the options in the help viewer are self-explanatory, the following options require further discussion: ✓ 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.
Part 1: Getting to Know Excel 2010 If you’re offline when you initiate a search, Excel uses help content internal to your system. Whether online or offline, you can narrow your search scope further by selecting an appropriate option from the Search button menu. ✓ Status bar: The left side of the status bar (located at the bottom of the help viewer) displays the current search scope.
