Excel Basics - 1

Hello All,

As mentioned in the introductory post I had mentioned that this blog will cater to 2 sets of audiences, one who want to learn excel from basics and others who have specific queries on excel. This post is for the former set of learners and will cover the most basic aspects of excel. So lets start right away.

So what is Excel? It is a spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft and part of its Microsoft Office Suite. Wikipedia defines spreadsheet program as an interactive computer application for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Basically what it means that it provides you with a table where you can enter your data and then analyse it as per your requirements.

Rows and Columns

How does excel provide you with a table. The answer is simple. It makes available a sheet of rows and columns which combine to give you a table. That is the most basic aspect of excel. In other words, in the most basic terms excel is nothing but a combination of rows and columns. The combination of rows and column is called a sheet. Any excel spreadsheet can have multiple sheets. The only restriction is that all the sheet names must be unique. The intersection of rows and columns is called a cell. The cell is the most basic data entry point in excel. At any point, you can select one or many cells in the spreadsheet. The rows in the spreadsheet are named after alphabets (A, B, C etc.) while the columns are named numerically (1, 2, 3 etc). Consequentially, the nomenclature of cells follows a combination of alphabets and numbers depending on which row and column intersect. For example in the below example, the cell highlighted is J21 as it belongs to row J and column 21. This nomenclature of cell is also known as cell reference and is displayed in the top left corner above the rows and columns.

Cells, Rows and Columns

You can view the below short video to understand the very basic layout of excel.

Menus

As with other Microsoft products, the top part of the excel programs provides access to a variety of commonly used functions, conveniently grouped in menus. Apart from the standard menus from MS Office, there are a few menus specific to excel. A good knowledge of which menu has which functionalities can really speed up things when you are in that last minute rush to deliver an assignment or submit a model to your boss. We will go through each of the functions in the menus in detail as and when required. However, for the purpose of this article, below is the brief summary of what each menu has.

1. File - Just like the file menu on other MS tools, this provides quick access to saving the files, opening the recently accessed files, printing the spreadsheet, sharing it with a group of collaborators, publishing it online etc. One of the more advanced features is workbook protection where you can specify controls on the sheet before sharing it with others.
2. Home - This is one of the most used menus. It has access to commonly used features like cut, copy, paste, alignment, formatting of text as well as data, formatting of cells, copy formatting etc. One of the important functions here is conditional formatting, which can really help you visualize basic patterns in the data and portray it accordingly.
3. Insert - This menus allows you to insert a variety of  things like tables, designs, shapes etc in your sheet. It also allows you to insert pivot table which is one of the most useful tools in the excel to quickly draw summary insights from the data.
4. Page Layout - This allows you to configure the themes in your sheet, align the margins, change the orientation, changes the background, insert page breaks and do other similar things related to the layout of your sheet.
5. Formulas - Another one of the most important menus in the excel repository, this has a wide array of functions related to the formulas which is one of the most important things in excel. This menu groups the excel formulas in logical fashion so that for a novice it is easier to find a required formula. It also has a basic debugging functionality which allows evaluating and tracing a formula to check for errors. An interesting feature here is tracing of precedents and dependents to check how the inputs to a particular cell and to which other cells the current cell provides an input.
6. Data - This is again one of the specific menu for excel. It provides a range of options to connect to external data sources so that excel can pull required data for analysis. It also provides data manipulation functions like duplicate elimination, data validation, text to column, grouping etc. It also provides a what -if analysis feature which is very useful in single input optimization and data tables which provides scenario analysis for single and dual inputs.
7. Review - This is basically similar to review menu found in other Office products and provides similar functions like spell check, thesaurus, review comments, translation, protection etc.
8. View - As the name suggests this menu is useful when you have to tinker with the presentation or view of the sheet. It allows you to set your custom views, add or remove things from view, freeze parts of excel sheet for easy readability etc.  

That brings us to an end of this post. To summarize we learnt about what excel is on a very basic level, what menus are and what functionality do they provide on a very high level. In the next post we will see how to enter data in an excel sheet, how to format data and using the basic tools and formulas to speed up the data entry and analysis process.

As always do provide your feedback as this is crucial and very important in creating and publishing the content which you require.

Thank you folks and happy excelling :)