Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
It may well be that you’re using a touch device to use Excel 2013.
You may, as I do, use a combination of touch, keyboard, and mouse when you’re using Office
applications.
Now to look at the detail of using touch with Excel 2013, particularly if you’re new to
it, we’re going to have to wait until we get a little bit further on in the course
because many of the touch gestures that you can use depend on an understanding of what
you’re trying to do with them and until we get to that point in the course it won’t
really make much sense for me to go through all of the different touch gestures now.
But I’d like to point you in the right direction on a couple of early things.
And one of them is that if you want to get access to a good document to help you with
the use of touch in Office 2013 in general and Excel 2013 specifically, you can access
that from the Excel Help.
We’re going to be opening Excel in a moment and looking at Excel 2013.
Once it’s open you can get help by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard.
There’s also a link to Help which we’ll see a little bit later on.
And if you then search the Help for the word Touch as I’ve done here, you will see the
Office Touch Guide and that gives you a pretty good guide to using touch with Office 2013
in general.
Now if you’re used to using touch you’ll be familiar with much of this terminology.
So instead of left click, it’s tap.
You also have features like using pinch where you pinch fingers together, stretch where
you do the opposite of pinch.
Then we have slide, swipe, and the like.
Now I’m going to use those terms from time to time, particularly early on in the course
when I talk about the alternative ways of doing certain things and how to do them on
a touch device.
But it gets really rather repetitive and rather boring if I have to say every time I do anything
on the course all of the different ways of doing it.
So once I’ve introduced one of the touch related gestures then I’m generally not
going to use it again or at least I’ll use it rarely in the rest of the course.
There are, of course, many things other than the simple ones I’ve mentioned there.
So if I go a little bit further down this document, you have things like in an Office
program if you want to customize the Quick Access Toolbar, if you’ve got no idea what
I’m talking about I’ll explain that later on.
It tells here to do that with touch press, hold, and release any button.
Now with these various things I’m going to come back to them when we come to the relevant
point in the Excel course and look at it at least once.
And then a little bit further down this document, past the areas that are generally Office 2013
there are some specific things that relate to Excel; so how to edit Excel, how to select
a range of data, how to clear a cells content.
So these are specific.
And then later on we have specifics for other programs in the suite such as PowerPoint.
So in the short term if you want to get access to that document and let it just explain all
of the basic touch gestures, you’re going to need, then that’s a good place to start.
And as I say when we get to each of those in the course I’ll talk about the touch
equivalent when I cover it using keyboard and mouse.
So that’s a lightening quick review of where to find information about using touch.
I’ll be coming back to that later on during the course.
I think it’s time we opened Excel and took a look at it.
I’ll see you in the next section.