Welcome to this introduction for Microsoft Excel. Excel is a data manipulation and spreadsheet tool. It's quite powerful, and we'll just show some of the basic capabilities that it has here today. Much like Microsoft Word, in the bottom right-hand corner, you've got your zoom controls as well as a ribbon menu layout with multiple different menus that you can use to interact with your spreadsheet. For Excel, we'll start here with an empty spreadsheet or a worksheet. Notice you can have multiple sheets in a workbook, is what Excel calls it. You can hit the "Plus" here to continue adding additional sheets if you need them, and also right-click on a sheet and delete it if you do not need it. To get started entering data is quite simple. Typically when you're working with data, you'll have a row of column headings. You may have like an employee ID, their name, their salary, and whatever other information you want. This is manual entry in Excel currently. You can also import data from text-based documents, from databases, from Internet queries, there are many ways to get data into Excel, but for now we'll do manual entry. Let's say I have two employees, Joe and Jim. Joe makes $50,000, and Jim makes $80,000. Here's some simple information in an Excel worksheet. I can format this as a table if I'd like to. Again, in the ribbon here on the home section, I have an option here "Format as a table" If I click that down arrow, you can see multiple different styling options here, formatting options. Just for an example, I'll choose this one, and then it just wants to know where is the data. Now I will click and drag from that first cell to the last cell, and you can see it updates the range of data for this table. My table does have headers because I added ID, name, and salary so I'll check that box and we'll hit "Okay" Then you'll see Excel reformats that as a table. Now, if I were to add additional rows, you can see that that formatting will continue. Now, I can also resort the data in this table. I can filter the data in this table. I get some interesting functionality out of the box here. Now, our other example, I'm going to use data that you may be a little more familiar with. Going back to our PCPicker days when we used that website to create a conceptual computer build. I have a second sheet here that I've pre-filled with some of my selections from PCPartPicker. I did manually type these in because PCPartPicker does not give me a direct export to Excel, so I've pre-added this data in here for us. You can see some of the data gets cut off here by the columns, and so I can go up to the edge of two columns. You'll notice my cursor changes. I can double click there and Excel will automatically expand to cover the content of that column. I'll do that in each of these three columns. This one is not formatted as a table yet, and also our price is not formatted in dollars, so I'd like to do that. I will highlight this entire column, Column C, and then in the home ribbon, I have a format section here to format this column as dollars. I'll click that button and notice now we have prices here in US dollars. I won't do it for this example, but I could change the number of decimals here using these two buttons here, increase and decrease decimals, but I'd like to have this down to the penny in my conceptual build. Again, these are just an example build from PCPartPicker. I might want to format this table as we did on the other sheets. This time I'll pre-select the data that I want formatted, and I'll click on "Format as table" This time I will select this one. Again, my table has headers because I have type, item, and price, and then this is the correct range, so I'll click "Okay" Now, my PCPartPicker list is formatted as a table and a little bit more readable. We get some striping of rows and things like that. Now, I might want to know what the total price is here. Excel comes with many formulas pre-built into it, and you do not have to necessarily know how to type in all of those formulas. This one to sum up all of these individual items is very simple. In Excel, there's actually a pre-built button for it, right over here in the home ribbon called Sum. I could just click on "Sum" there, and it will give me the sum of all of these items directly above it. If I undo that, there are a couple of other options. I can hit the equal sign and that will allow me to start typing in a formula. I know that in Excel I have a function called Sum, so I can type the word sum, and when I open parentheses there, you can see I get a little pop-up now asking me to start inputting numbers and it will add them all together. One thing you can do in Excel is select a range of information that you want in that sum. If I select my range there and then close my parentheses and hit "Enter" I will also get my sum of all of those individual items. You can see here, it knows I wanted sum of price. Excel does some pretty smart calculations there for you. Now, if I undo that one more time, I also have this function button here, so instead of using the equals key to start with a function or formula, I can just click on this fx button. Now, I get a formula builder, so now you can see a little bit of the depth of formulas that are available to us in Excel. They can be organized by categories. You'll see my most recently used here at the top but then there are many formulas and functions available. Also when you choose one, let's look at average as an example, you'll get all of the information about that particular function or formula in Excel to help you determine if this is the right formula for what you're trying to accomplish. All of that to return back to our simple method of just clicking on the Sum button and we get our sum total for our conceptual PCPartPicker build. That is a simple example of Excel. Again, all of your basic functionality will resemble what we saw in Microsoft Word, where I can save either locally or to the Cloud, I can print this worksheet, I can email the worksheet. We get all of that functionality along with this tool as part of the Microsoft Office Suite.
