Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
In this section, we’re going to open Excel again, take another look at the introductory
screen, and then we’re going to create a new workbook.
So once again I’m using the keyboard shortcut on my desktop in Windows 8, double click on
that, Excel opens, and now you can see that on the recent files list the workbook that
I opened during the previous section is now in the list.
And as I work on further workbooks, I’ll find that they’re names appear in this recent
files list here.
So let’s suppose now that we want to create a new workbook.
We can start from the same place and we can choose Blank Workbook.
I’ll come back to Blank Workbook in just a moment.
Let’s have a quick look at some of the templates first.
If you scroll down and, of course, to scroll down if you’re using a touch screen, you
can just scroll with your finger in the usual way.
If you go down and look at the available templates, for instance, here’s one Generic Family
Budget.
If I tap on Generic Family Budget, what happens is the template details are downloaded from
Microsoft.
You can look at the description of what this template is and there will normally be a rating
as well so other people who’ve tried this template will rate and in terms of what they
thought of it on the basis of various factors.
If you like the look of it and you want to give it a try, you click on Create and the
template itself will be downloaded from Microsoft.
So let’s try this one.
Let’s click on Create.
It’s downloaded and then when it’s available it opens.
And as you can see you’ve got a graphical kind of representation of a family’s budget.
You can see how the money, the money spent by the family is split up here.
There are some summarizing totals over here: Income $4,000, Expenses $5,933, a Cash Flow.
Well, they’ve overspent in March.
So you may wonder well where all these numbers are.
Well this page, this worksheet, note the tab down there is really a dashboard.
That means it’s a summary of some other information.
The second spreadsheet, the second worksheet is labeled Budget.
And if I click on Budget, I can see where all of the various money entries are.
And there’s quite a bit of information in there.
Note that there is a scrollbar on the right that I can use to scroll up and down.
And there’s also a scrollbar at the bottom that lets me scroll left and right.
Now, of course, you can do both of these things if you’re using a touch device just by using
the touch device to scroll in the usual way.
And then finally there’s another worksheet, a setup worksheet, which actually establishes
the categories.
So for instance, it says that under Daily Living, there’s a column here, the categories
in Daily Living are Groceries, Personal Supplies, Clothing, Cleaning Services, etc.
Now the general idea of these templates is that somebody has gone to the trouble of creating
the mechanism to make this thing work.
And you could take this, maybe adapt the categories to your own requirements, and once you’ve
put your figures in there, you should find that the dashboard will give you a good representation
of your family’s budget over the same period.
Now, of course, you won’t have the same figures as this other family, the Johnson
family, and you probably won’t have the same categories.
You may want to summarize the thing in a different way.
But this is a really excellent way of getting you started on setting up a workbook to perform
a useful function, in this case in your home life.
And what’s more even though this is intended to be used for a family budget, family cash
flow, it will be very easy to adapt this to the performance of a small business for example.
Now it’s true to say that many of the templates that are provided are for a beginner quite
complex and in order to use a template like this, you’re going to need to know quite
a bit more about Excel.
So I’m going to steer clear of these templates for the moment.
We’ll come back and look at one or two of the details later on.
We’re going to start off with some of the real basics here in terms of understanding
how to enter and edit data, for example.
So I’m going to close this one.
I hope you can remember how to do that.
Click on File to go into Backstage View, Close.
Now note in this case that Microsoft Excel thinks we may have created a workbook here
and that we may have put material in it that we want to save.
So it says, Do you want to save your changes?
Now what I’ve done there really is to move around and show you a couple of things.
We haven’t actually made any changes.
And even if we had I don’t want to save them.
So I’m just going to click on Don’t Save.
That means that this particular workbook will be closed but it will not be saved on my computer.
So click or tap Don’t Save and we’re back to the empty Excel again.
Now we really are going to create a new blank workbook.
Now one way of doing that if we go back into Backstage View and click on New, we see that
same list.
It’s slightly differently arranged now because we’ve got a bit more space on the screen.
But on this occasion, I’m going to choose Blank Workbook.
Now when you choose Blank Workbook that’s exactly what you get.
You get a Workbook.
It has a default name normally of Book 1.
If you’ve been working in Excel for a while, created and worked on a few workbooks during
one session, a new one might say Book 2 or Book 3 or Book 4.
But we’re just starting fresh here so it’s Book 1.
And note there’s one worksheet down here and by Default it’s called Sheet 1.
So there’s our empty workbook to work with.
Now in terms of putting some numbers on these workbooks in a couple of sections time, we’re
going to devote most of a section to entering and editing data and all the different types
of data we might put in, in Excel.
What I really want to show you now at the end of this section is how to save a workbook.
So all I want to do is put some numbers in this worksheet.
It really doesn’t matter what numbers you put in there as long as you put in at least
one.
Now at the moment when you’ve got a new workbook open, you’ll find normally Cell
A, that’s Column A, 1 that’s Row 1.
A1 will have a border around it with a little sort of square thing in the corner.
I’ll tell you about all this a little bit later on.
But that is the currently selected cell.
That’s what we call the selection.
And if on your keyboard you just type a two or anything else for that matter.
You could put an A or a Z or a B or anything you like.
You will find that will appear in that first cell.
Now you may not want to do anything more than that at the moment.
I’m going to go to B1.
Just by clicking in it that moves the selection to B1.
I’m going to put a different number in there.
C1, well that’ll do me for now.
Notice that as you move to the next cell, look at the four in C1, it’s on the left
of the cell.
As I click to the next one you’ll see it moves over to the right.
Now I’ll explain all that to you later on because it’s quite a lot going on there
and it’s important to understand some of that.
But that’s all you need to do.
Just put some numbers or letters somewhere on this worksheet and then we’re going to
close the worksheet but we’re going to save it.
Now you could just do File, Close.
And then when Excel 2013 says to you “Do you want to save it?”
You could say Yes.
But we’re going to do this the professional way and we’re going to say File and we’re
going to do Save As.
Now Save As means I’ve not saved this before so I’ve got to tell you what it’s called.
So I’m going to do File, Save As.
Now I get the choice do I want to save to SkyDrive, somewhere on my computer?
Do I want to add a place?
I’ll go for computer.
There’s that last folder we used with the examples and let’s use that folder.
Let’s go in there.
Let’s start putting our own workbooks in there.
Now it’s an Excel workbook so it’s extension is .xlsx.
But the file name I’m going to call Toby, that’s my name, hyphen.
You can call these what you like.
But if you use my sort of naming standard, you’ll be able to follow more clearly what
we’re doing.
I’m going to call it toby-test-exercise-01.
So I’m thinking of these as my test exercises I’m going through the course.
So toby-test-exercise-01.
I’m going to put it in the same folder as the examples that come on the course.
Click on the Save button.
And that is now saved as a workbook with that name and note at the top of the Excel 2013
window you can see the file Name just to remind you what it’s called.
So use your own naming system.
Try to be consistent.
But you’ll find them then in the same place as the other files.
You could, of course, put these somewhere completely different on your computer if you
want to.
If you prefer to put them on a different drive in a different folder it’s entirely up to
you, as long as you remember where you’ve put them.
And then what I’m now going to do is to close this particular workbook.
So that’s easy enough.
Just go to Backstage View, click on Close.
Of course, I’ve just saved it so it won’t say to me, “Do you want to save any changes?”
because I’ve just saved the changes.
So it closes immediately and I’m left with empty Excel again.
So let’s see in this particular section we’ve opened an existing workbook and closed
it again, we’ve looked at a template, we’ve created a new workbook from scratch, saved
it with a file name, closed it, and we’ve once again opened and exited Excel all in
the same section.
So it’s been a pretty busy section this one.
You probably owe yourself a little bit of a break.
In the next section, we’re going to look at Help so please join me for that.