This is an introduction to microsoft excel version 2010 part 1 of 3. In this part I am
going to introduce this spreadsheet and more specifically the cells. A spreadsheet like
the one shown here is a set of cells which are these small boxes arranged into rows and
columns. These cells extend almost infinitely in each direction however no matter how far that
you go it is still considered one spreadsheet. When you have multiple spreadsheets as shown
by the tabs at the bottom of the screen they make up one work book. This is one workbook
with three spreadsheets. Using a spreadsheet with cell arranged in rows and columns makes
it far easier to work with large data sets and lists than it would be if you were calculating
on paper. It also simplifies complicated or repetitive calculations where you need to
use multiple formulas on one data set or the same formula on multiple data. Because the
cells are simple to format and manipulate it is a lot easier to read and interact with
the data especially for graphing. Graphing however will be covered in a different video.
With the cells each cell is completely self enclosed which means whatever is entered in
one cell can only be accessed by another cell if specifically told by the user. For example
I am going to enter something in the cell names "A1". Double clicking on the cell puts
it in enter mode where you can type in it. As you can see when I typed in the cell it
showed up both in the cell and also in the formula bar. Another way to enter into the
cell is to type it directly into the formula bar rather than the cell. It works the same
way. As you can see the cells around these are still empty. Before i go on I am going
to move to sheet two of this workbook where i have some sample data entered. This sheet
which is title "metric conversion" has data that is converted from American or standard
into Metric. The first data is temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius. The second data
is length which is converted from multiple different units. As you can see this first
cell is named "A1" which is shown in the name box here. "A1" however is also its location.
"A" refers to the column and 1 refers to the row. If i want to go to a different cell one
of the simpler ways to do it is just to scroll down to its location. If I want to go to "D104"
I have the column "D" and I scroll down until I find 104. That works well when you are using
a small data set however if you have much larger data then it is not as convenient to
scroll to find the specific location. Another way is to type the location directly into
the name cell. For example if I want cell "Q324" I type it up in the name cell and press
enter and I am automatically taken to the cell "Q324". The name of a cell can be changed.
As an example I am going to work with the data that is for the temperature in Fahrenheit.
This temperature is 65 degrees but the cell is currently named "B4". I am going to change
the name to "Fahr" as a shortened version of Fahrenheit. I could use the entire name
Fahrenheit but because the name is both long and difficult to spell there is a possibility
that it would be misspelled later or it would just get repetitive to type the whole thing
over and over. I press enter and now this cell has the name "Fahr". If I go to another
cell it still has the name of its location which is "C4". If I want to return to that
cell of the temperature Fahrenheit I just type in the name box "Fahr" and it takes me
back to that location. As you can see it does not matter whether it is capitalized or lowercase.
It still takes me back to that cell that has the same name. I can still also find that
cell by its location. If I type "B4" which was its previous name and press enter it will
still take me back to that cell even though that cell no longer has the name "B4" since
"B4" is still its location. One final thing I would like to go over in this video is when
the data within a cell is longer than the cell itself this. This has happened on this
sheet in cell "A1", "A3", "A4", "A10, "A12" and "C8". There are three different ways that
this can be fixed. The first is to change the width of the column. When I move my mouse
cursor between columns "A" and "B" it changes to this black double arrow. Clicking and dragging
allows me to change the width of this column which now gives room for most of these to
fit within the one column. As you can see however the name of the spreadsheet still
extends beyond the column. I could extend this column further to make room for metric
conversion within one cell but now my data is more difficult to read. Instead I am going
to wrap the text within the cell so that it takes up what seems to be two lines within
one cell. The button to do that is up here under alignment. The cell has gotten taller
to make room for both words within one cell. Since this is the title however and nothing
will be entered in the cell next to it I am going to undo that and just leave it extending
beyond to the next empty cell. If something does get entered in the next cell it will
once again cut off what is entered in cell "A1". The next location has data that takes
up nearly 5 whole cells. If anything is entered it will get cut off. If nothing will be entered
in these cells there is no need to correct this however a simple way to fix it is to
merge the cells together which can be done from this button here. You can merge and center
it which would change the alignment to center or merge across. Since we are using just one
row I am going to merge it across and now this is one single cell that takes up 5 columns.
Additional formatting which can be accessed from the tabs at the top will be covered in
the third part of this introduction.