Learn the basics of the user interface in Excel in the video tutorial - how to use the toolbar, zoom in and out of the sheet, and more.
Transcription
We're going to start this particular video off by talking about the quick access toolbar. The quick access toolbar is located in the upper left-hand corner. By default, there will be three icons you'll find there - the first icon is the floppy disk icon that represents saving your document. For those of you unfamiliar with the floppy disk it's an old version of a thumb drive. Then you have the undo button. You'll use this a lot when you're starting out because you'll make mistakes here and there and you'll want to undo them. Then you have the redo button. It's not active right now because we didn't undo anything yet.
Quick Access Toolbar
Then you have this little drop-down that you can click on to choose other commands you'd like to add to your quick access toolbar. Here are Microsoft's suggestions for the first set of commands that you may wish to add to your quick access toolbar. A popular one is spelling. You want to make sure your document doesn't have any spelling mistakes so you'll navigate over to spelling click once and now you have the command available to you and have easy access with one click. When I click back on the drop-down I'll see there's a checkmark there that lets me know that I actually did select that and add it to the quick access toolbar. It's already there. Next, we'll take a look at the ribbon tabs. you'll start off with eight ribbon tabs including the file tab which is different from all the others. If you click on the file you'll be taken to an area called backstage. This is where you can access templates, create new documents and open up existing documents.
Popular Commands
Then you have the home or you'll have a list of the popular commands for Excel. They're organized into groups how are the groups organized well you see this little line separator they border off groups of commands and the names of the groups are at the bottom so this set of commands is in the clipboard group this set of commands is in the font group and this set of commands and is in the alignment group so as you're navigating the different tabs take a look at the bottom and go to the particular group that contains the commands that you want. then you won't have to look at every single command in the ribbon so that is the ribbon tabs and the ribbon groups let's continue I'll show you an option that you have available to you if you choose the review tab I'm gonna select this cell that contains the word The Avengers. I may need to do research on the Avengers so on the review tab, I can just click smart lookup. What will happen is a pane will open up to the side and I will see information related to the text that's in my document. This is a great way to do research on a particular topic without leaving the Excel application. Now I'm going to close this spell check - it is located on the review tab as well and you can click right here to access the spell check. if you hover your mouse over certain commands you'll see a keyboard shortcut, F7 is the keyboard shortcut for spelling.
Insert
Now let's take a look at the insert function button. Now when I teach my classes I start off by telling students I'm a mathematical genius. I'm able to compute numbers in my head without even using any kind of function. what I tell them is all I have to do is select some cells and using the power of my mind I can tell them the total for the values. I just selected is three thousand and twelve well another part of the user interface you may not notice is in the status bar down at the status bar if you select some cells you'll see some information related to the cells that you just selected now I actually want to add these numbers up so I am going to go to the interface element that we're talking about here called the insert function button. If you move your mouse just above the column letters they will see a command that you can access that has the letters F. If I click FX it opens up this dialog box and this allows me to choose functions that I might want to use to calculate the sum of values directly above the cell. The reason I go over this section is you can get help related to the functions you may be unfamiliar with. now I'm familiar with some but let's say there are other functions of not familiar with all I have to do is click help on this function and then when I do a web page will open up I'm gonna bring that web page into view it'll take me to a Microsoft web page where I can play a video that walks me through the process of using the sum function so. this is a nice bit of self-help that you can do for yourself if you need further instructions you can scroll down and take a look at step-by-step screenshots that will walk you through the process of using some function. I'm going to close this and now let's actually use the sum function. All I will need to do is click OK and you'll see Excel automatically does the typing for me. it even gives me a preview of what the answer is so I can see if it looks right and has automatically selected the values all I need to do now is click OK and I've added those values in the cell.
Zoom
Let's take a look at another user interface element, the zoom slider. I may need to zoom into my spreadsheet so down at the bottom right-hand corner. I have plus and minus signs that I can use to increase or decrease the spreadsheet 10% at a time. now since we just worked with the sum function if I take a look right next to the FX insert function button command I will see equals sum this is the formula bar and this will reveal whether or not there are formulas in a cell that I have selected and you can see the sum function has selected cells. Another method you can use to zoom in out of your spreadsheet involves a combination of holding on to the control key and using the scroll wheel on your mouse. if you have a scroll wheel this allows you to zoom in and out of your spreadsheet very easily and intuitively so now let's take a look at the sheet selector buttons they're located towards the bottom of your spreadsheet in order for us to see the sheet selector buttons we actually need to grab this part of the sheet tab area and move into the tab so we see some hidden tabs.
Now I can see arrow keys that I can click on to reveal more sheets that I can't see and I can use the arrow keys to move over to the left if I quickly want to get to the end of the set of sheets that are here I can press the control key and click the right arrow key and I jump all the way to the end I can also press control and click the first triangle and jump to the beginning. Now if I want to navigate my sheets in a vertical fashion I can right-click anywhere on the triangles and you can see that pop-up is letting you know that you can do that and you'll get a vertical listing of all the sheets then if you need to jump to a certain sheet you could just select it and then click OK and you'll jump to that specific sheet so I'm gonna head back to the interface. Now let's take a look at rows and columns every spreadsheet you work with contains 16384 columns and 1,048,576 rows. Excel gives you a lot of space to work with data in your spreadsheet so that completes the interface section.