CHAPTER 1 ■ BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH EXCEL

Microsoft Office is Microsoft’s most profitable product. Microsoft devoted most of its effort in Microsoft
Office 2016 to updating Excel. Microsoft made few changes to its other products in Office.

History of Spreadsheets
VisiCalc (short for Visible Calculator) was the first computerized spreadsheet available to the public. It was
created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979 for the Apple IIe and then released in 1981 for the newly
created IBM PC. Up to this point, sales of personal computers had been slow because there wasn’t a lot you
could do with them. Early PCs were very expensive and there weren’t any prewritten applications. They
were mostly purchased by computer programmers who thought they were fascinating and it gave them a
chance to practice programming at home. At this point, programmers worked on large-scale computers
called mainframes. At that time, you couldn’t go to a store and buy software like you can today. Back then,
company programmers wrote all the programs that the company needed themselves. Each company
wrote its own payroll program, its own inventory program, etc. Companies didn’t share the software with
each other. With VisiCalc, businesses now had a product that could be of great benefit. Sales of personal
computers took off. VisiCalc became the world’s first Super App. VisiCalc also started a revolution in
businesses being started for the sole purpose of creating software to be sold to the public.
The Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet program was released in 1983. It was made specifically for the IBM PC. It
was faster and had better graphics than VisiCalc and soon replaced it. Lotus 1-2-3 greatly increased the sales
of the IBM PC.
Microsoft Excel has dominated the spreadsheet market since the 1990s.

This Book
An Excel book that taught you every possible option would be too large for you to carry. As you go through
the material in the book, explore the different options and try different things, think about how you could use
what is being taught in different environments. Don’t just click here and enter that, because that is what the
book is telling you to do without thinking about what it is you are doing. Excel is so powerful and is capable of
doing so many things. Be a free thinker and think about how you could use Excel to solve various problems.
Throughout this book you will be reading about an Excel topic followed by a practice. You can learn
by reading, but to fully comprehend the different topics you should do the exercises. Many illustrations are
included to make it easier to follow along and comprehend.

■ Note Your Excel program might not match perfectly with this workbook. Microsoft is constantly making
changes to the program through the Internet.

Excel Navigation Basics

Before we can do anything with Excel, let’s get to know the main parts of the program. Figure 1-1 shows an
Excel workbook. The arrows have been added to highlight the purpose of the different areas of the workbook.

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Figure 1-1. An Excel workbook

Figure 1-1 shows essential components of the workbook and worksheet. I’ll work clockwise around the
sheet starting with the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).
• The QAT is a shortcut tool for storing the commands you use most often and want
quick access to.
• The formula bar shows the formulas for the current selected cell. Excel displays the
result of the formulas, not the formula itself, in each cell. This bar lets you see the
formula that is producing the cell results.
• The vertical scroll bar and horizontal scroll bar allow you to move through the
worksheet page.
• The Zoom control, Page Break Preview, Page Layout View and Normal View are
buttons that allow you to control how you are viewing the worksheet.

• The Zoom control lets you increase or decrease the size (Zoom percentage) of
the worksheet on your screen.
• Page Break Preview allows you to control where one page ends and another
begins. This helps make the worksheet more user friendly by allowing pages to
be organized in a way that makes sense to the user.
• Page Layout View shows how the page will look when it is printed. Use this
function to ensure the printed workbook will be neat and easy to read.
• Normal View is the default view. It shows how the workbook looks while you are
working on it. Sheet Tabs let you select the worksheet that you want to work on
or view. Many workbooks in Excel will have multiple sheets.
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The row number tells you what row you are on in the workbook. Excel has a potential of 1,048,576
rows. Columns are identified by letters. There are 16,384 columns in an Excel spreadsheet. This means that
a single worksheet contains more than 17 billion cells. Each cell can hold 32,767 characters. How many
worksheets you can have in a workbook depends upon your computer’s available memory. Each cell is
identified by an address which consists of the column letter and the row number. The Name box displays
the address of the cell where you are at the moment. The Name box in Figure 1-1 displays A1 which is the
address of the current active cell. The Ribbon provides access to all of Excel’s capabilities. The Ribbon will be
discussed in much greater detail later in this chapter and in subsequent chapters.

Creating, Saving, and Opening Workbooks

The first step is to create a workbook. Next, you must make sure to save your work as you go. You should
consider what you want in the workbook and what it should be named before you create and save it. This
will make it easy to open and use it again.
We’ll start our Excel journey by creating a new workbook and then examine the different parts of
the workbook. How you start Excel depends upon your operating system. Excel starts just like any other
application you use.

EXERCISE 1-1: CREATING AND SAVING A WORKBOOK

In this exercise, we’ll create a simple blank workbook and save it.
1. Start your Excel program. If the Excel start button is on your status bar you can click
on it, otherwise start Excel the way you normally start a program. Figure 1-2 shows
the opening window.

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Figure 1-2. Excel starting window

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■ Note The file names on the left side of your window will not be the same as those shown in Figure 1-2
because they are the names of the files that I have opened.

2. When you start a new workbook, you have two choices:

• You can start with a blank workbook by clicking the Blank workbook button, or
• You can click one of the many template buttons to create a new workbook based
on the templates you selected.

Click Blank workbook for this exercise.

3. Click any cell, type any value you want, and then press the Enter key.

4. Click the Save button located on the QAT at the top left of your window (see
Figure 1-1). The first time you save the workbook Excel will display the File tab with
Save As highlighted. See Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Places to save your workbook

■ Note You will learn a lot more about saving workbooks from the File tab (known as the Backstage) in
Chapter 6.

You can save your file to many different locations. If you are using this book in a school, you
should ask your instructor where to save your files. The folders on the right are places where
you have recently saved files. Selecting one of these locations or clicking on the Browse
button will bring up the Save As window.
5. Click Browse.
Your Save As window may look slightly different than the one in Figure 1-4 depending upon
your version of Windows. If you have used File Explorer before, this window works the same