Hey guys, welcome to ExcelForNoobs.com. This is a quick video I'm throwing together covering the most 10 basic things that you need to know about Microsoft Excel 2013 to effectively use this application. So I'm going to cover in this tutorial is navigation, data entry, making content fit, formulas, formatting cells, worksheet operations, tables, charts, how to save your Excel files, and how to print your Excel files. Alright, so you can already see that I have the Excel application, Microsoft Excel 2013 application open.
First thing I'll cover is the Excel ribbon up here. This is the Excel ribbon. This is where you get most of your commands.
What commands do, they basically tell Excel what to do. So right now I have the Home ribbon open, the Home tab, and that's the Home ribbon showing. And the Home ribbon, this is probably the most commonly used ribbon in Excel.
You can do different things like change the font size, font color, that's where those commands are. You have your alignment, different groups of commands, content alignment where you can merge your cells or unmerge your cells. And different things like that.
You also have your, click here, you have the insert tab. And in this ribbon, you can insert charts, images. Other features such as those different shapes, smart art, word art, formulas, symbols, things like that.
Here you have the page layout ribbon. This is where you can work with your page setup, different themes in Excel. You can mess with.
your margins, your orientation, whether you want it to be landscape, legal, and other things that would affect the way your worksheet would be printed. Here we have formulas. Here's a way where you can look up different formulas.
formulas you can't our functions you can insert formulas and other operations related to formulas just as its name here we have data I'm not really not going to really go into this in this tutorial Review, Spelling, different things like that, Spell Check. We have our View tab here. We'll work with this a little bit when it comes to printing and how we want our worksheet to be viewed. Then Developer.
goes in this is more advanced features of Microsoft Excel and we're not going to go into this and then finally you have the file tab and here's where you do different saving and printing operations then of course you can access your options and change your preferences now up here I'm clicking this back button it's going to bring us back to regular view out of the backstage view. Okay, so I've selected my home tab. That's going to be the tab that you're most more than likely going to use. Alright, now I'm going to cover the worksheet itself.
You can see up here I have my column letters and this goes all the way to X F D and then we have row numbers here and A cell you can see what I'm clicking here. These are cells a cell address If I were to say cell B2, then this would be cell B2. A cell address is where a column letter meets a row number.
So this cell right here is where column B meets row 2, and that's cell B2. Over here, that's cell D5, where column D meets row 5. Okay, now the way that I'm selecting these cells, first I'll show you by using the mouse. I can just hold my cursor over each individual cell and left-click.
click and that's going to select the cell. I can also select a range of cells and what I'm doing is right now I just selected that cell. I'm holding the left button down on my mouse, left click button and I'm moving my mouse down and to the right. And that will select however big of a range I want.
So you can see there I have four columns and nine rows starting at row two. I can also do it. From bottom right to top left.
From left to right. And from right to left. So that's basically how you can select different cells.
And we'll get into why you would want to select cells, but that would be to do different formatting commands. You can also use your keyboard. Here I'm hitting the right arrow button.
Now I'm hitting the down arrow button. And I'm going to select the right cell. left arrow button and the up arrow button. Okay, another way to select a range of cells using your mouse is I am holding control and now while holding control I'm using the right arrow and that's selecting the very last cell in the worksheet.
Now what it will do is, let me type in some content here. content and then over here and cell h3 again I'm going to type in content and now watch what happens I'm going to hold down control and now I'm going to press the right arrow button while holding down control and it's going to select the content it's going to select the very next cell that contains content the same thing would happen If I were to hold down control and then press the up button, it goes and same to the left. I'm holding down control. So now control right, down, up, left, all while holding control.
Alright, if I want to select a range of cells, I can hit the shift button and then I'm hitting the right arrow and it's selecting a range of cells and the down arrow. And now the up arrow and it's deselecting right down. Okay. So those are the most basic ways to navigate through Excel.
You can also use the scroll bars. You can see I'm doing that. I'm scrolling down or I can scroll to the right. There's nothing in this worksheet at all.
But you can use the scroll bars. Okay. Okay, now the next thing I'm going to cover is how to enter data.
You kind of saw a little bit of what I did, but the basic way I'm going to select my cells and now I'm entering data. I'll enter a month there. You can see I just selected the cell and I entered in data.
The same thing would go. I could select a cell and up here we have the formula bar. I can enter data.
So I can enter directly into the cell or I can enter data into the formula bar. Now I'm going to show you a feature that's called auto fill and this is where Excel starts to be a lot more useful, you know, basically a lot more efficient than other. Then he manually entered in something in a worksheet or in a word processor.
Alright, so what I'm doing is autofill. I'm going to go ahead and delete that month because Excel automatically recognizes that we are entering in a pattern here. January, which is the month of the year.
So you can see that I've entered in January in cell B3, and now you can see this box in the right. You can see that the cell is surrounded by a bold box and there's a square in the bottom right. I can select that square with my mouse and then I start dragging it to the right.
and Excel is automatically going to fill these cells in with those months. So I don't have to go through and manually enter in the months. Excel automatically enters in those months for me with the correct spelling.
So that's obviously a very efficient feature that you need to know, that you must know in Excel. Another one is autocomplete. Say I was entering in employees'names.
into a worksheet. Let's see over here. For different things.
And then I had to keep selecting cells and entering in. You know, say we had the same employees working for us. I wouldn't have to type in their name every time.
So you can see I hit, all I did was hit T, enter in T. And it filled in the rest of the name for me and hit enter. So that works out. Here's another one.
I go down. As soon as I hit J. Okay, let's enter in another name. Okay, now we have two J's, so I come down and say I hit J, nothing happens.
It's going to, once I start entering in... and it will eliminate any other names because since there's no other name that starts with j e it's jeremy since there's two names you saw that that started with j it didn't auto fill anything for me it wanted to be sure okay now let's do it