Excel 101

Preface (Important Information about the Book!)

How to use this book and what you can expect from it

Thank you very much for choosing this book!

Probably everyone knows that Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program. But most people only know the basic functions and cannot use the hidden treasures in Excel. This misery is over now. In this book you will learn how to make full use of Excel's top functions. This book equips you with the most important tools in your daily struggle with the flood of data and information that we are exposed to in our private and professional lives today.

Bring order to your tables and shine with sophisticated Excel knowledge. Not only will you impress your superiors, but you will also have helpful tools at your fingertips in your private life. For the administration of personal property, real estate, planning birthday parties and much more.

To provide a clear introduction at all levels, the book is divided into Basic and Expert topics within the chapters. The Basic sections explain basic functions that provide everyday help. In the Expert chapters we go a little deeper into the subject and learn advanced functions for the corresponding topic. Each chapter contains theoretical instructions (illustrated & step by step) as well as many practical examples.

The font color of the chapter headings reflects the difficulty level Basic or Expert. As a beginner you should read all chapters from the beginning, especially chapters with green writing (Basic). Chapters with violet font colour are interesting for beginners as well as for advanced users. And as an advanced Excel user you can skip green chapters and start immediately with the blue chapters (Expert).

Of course this is only a classification according to the author's feeling. You have to find out for yourself what level you are at in Excel. So please take this classification only as a recommendation.

The Ribbon, which will be mentioned frequently, can be found in Excel at the top, just below the green bar including well-known functions such as Save, Undo, etc.

This book is suitable for Microsoft Excel 2010, 2013, 2016 & 2019 as well as Microsoft Office 365. The information in this book was created using Excel from Microsoft Office 365, so some features of the Excel versions may differ from earlier versions (especially 2010 & 2013). This also applies to design elements. Don't let it throw you off track. In the end you will certainly learn many great functions!

Try to actively practice the examples and theoretical considerations in Excel, rather than just reading the book. This is very important to internalize the functions as you know for sure: Only practice makes perfect! Let´s get started!

1 Excel Interface & Settings

At the beginning you will get a first overview of Excel's user interface and the basic functions & settings. In this section we will discuss very basic things, i.e. if you have already used Excel a few times, you can skip chapter 1.1. However, you should follow the recommended settings in chapter 1.2.

1.1 Excel Interface & Important Sections

We start with the red framed area in Fig. 1, where you can navigate through the ribbon. If some sections are not displayed in the ribbon, you have to activate them first, as explained in Chapter 1.2. The section Home includes basic functions.

In the orange framed area you will find the cell name box. By default, this is specified with an alphanumeric reference (A1,B2,...). However, you can also name the cell as you wish. To do this, select the orange-framed cell field and write the name, then confirm with Enter. Note that you must now use the new name for each reference to this cell.

The area framed in blue is used to enter a function (but normal text or numbers can also be entered). For a selection and description of possible functions click on the small fx symbol.

In the green framed section in the lower area you will find the possibility to add and manage further worksheets. In the yellow area you can scale the display (zoom) and choose between normal display, page layout or page break view. Just try out the different display options!

Figure 1: Excel Interface and worksheet

In area 1 (see Fig. 1) you can copy, paste or cut content and use Format painter. This function is very