Navigate Microsoft Excel 2013
Edited by Alexander Avdeev, VC, Crystal
Welcome to VisiHow! This video will demonstrate how to navigate Microsoft Excel 2013 and become familiar with it. Excel is a spreadsheet program that can be used for creating reports, inputting, organizing and analyzing information, and many other purposes. Such purposes may include inputting survey information and creating budgets, invoices and time sheets.
Steps
- 1To purchase a copy of Microsoft Excel 2013, go to the Microsoft site, http://microsoft.com, or directly to http://products.office.com. On the site, select the country if it is not detected by the site. After that, offered products will be visible. There are various Microsoft Office packages that can be purchased on monthly or one-time plans. Excel may also be found as a stand-alone product. The available selection varies by country. Note: as of today, May 12. 2015, the latest version of Microsoft Excel is Microsoft Excel 2013, v15.0. Once the copy of Excel is obtained, install it and then run it.
Advertisement - 2To run Microsoft Excel 2013, locate it. In this video, it is actually pinned to the taskbar on the desktop. The icon looks like a green book with a white "X" on it. If the Microsoft Excel 2013 icon cannot be found on the taskbar, simply go to the search function on the operating system. For Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, move the cursor to the right side of the desktop and click "Search". For Windows 7, click the start button. Then, type "excel" to find Microsoft Excel 2013. Open up the program. The first thing that will appear is the starting page.
Advertisement - 3Let's review the green section. The starting page has a green section that shows "Excel" on the left-hand side of the screen. For example, if some new workbooks were created, or there were recently opened workbooks, then some shortcuts to those items would be displayed here, in the "Recent" section. Then, these shortcuts can be accessed quickly. There is also the "Open Other Workbooks" section. For example, if a workbook was downloaded to your computer, sent by a colleague or friend who wanted it to be looked at, then the particular file can be searched for by clicking "Open Office Workbooks". The same can be done if an older workbook, which has been created and updated, needs to be examined.
- 4Let's review the white section. In the white portion on the screen, there is an assortment of templates. If there is something relevant, then this is definitely what is needed for a quick production of a document. Find the templates section, examine the templates, choose and create a template by clicking one of the templates, and fill in data into the template, replacing "dummy" information that is put into the template by default. If the template that serves the required purpose is not immediately on the screen, then a search can be performed in the upper section of the area. It is also possible to type something specific in the search bar at the top. For the purpose of the tutorial, a template with no "dummy" information is opened. The template is just a blank workbook.
- 5Click "Blank workbook". Once a blank workbook is created, the Excel workbook environment will be displayed. At the top, there is the ribbon that has "FILE", "HOME", "INSERT", etc. The ribbon is an area with small tabs that can perform certain actions in the workbook.
- 6Click the "PAGE LAYOUT" tab in the ribbon. Such parameters as the layout and margins of the page can now be changed by clicking the icons below the ribbon.
- 7Click the "INSERT" tab in the ribbon. Charts, pictures, tables, etc., can be put into the workbook by clicking the appropriate icons below the ribbon.
- 8Click the "FORMULAS" tab in the ribbon. Now, different formulas can be looked up. All other tabs behave in the similar manner, revealing new buttons below them.
- 9Let's review the quick access toolbar. The quick access toolbar is located at the top. It shows the icons that need to be used quickly. There are the save, undo and redo buttons. If a mistake is made, it is possible to go back to the initial step by clicking the undo button. If this undo action must be cancelled, click the redo button.
- 10Click on the arrow in the quick access toolbar to customize it. A pop-up menu will appear. There are various options that can be added to that quick access toolbar.
- 11Select the option that needs to be added to the quick access toolbar. For example, If the "Quick Print" option needs to be added to the quick access toolbar, simply select that, and the quick access toolbar will have it available.
- 12Click the "FILE" tab. the application will go back to the green area. There are various options here as well. "New" will open up a blank workbook, and "Open" to open an existing workbook. "Save" will save the file, "Save As" will save the file with a custom name and "Print" will print. There's also "Share" or "Export" to save the file for another program and "Close" to close the menu.
- 13Click "Share". The share button allows inviting people to look or modify a document saved to Microsoft OneDrive. Click "save To Cloud" to save it to OneDrive. An e-mail message with the workbook can be sent to others by clicking "Email".
- 14Let's review the workbook itself. Notice that there are columns and rows. The columns are lettered blocks that represent the vertical sections of the worksheet ("A", "B", "C", "D"...). The rows are numerical horizontal sections ("1", "2", "3", "4"...). The blocks are called "cells". Navigate them by using arrows on your keyboard or by clicking a cell with the left mouse button. The cursor is shaped like a plus sign when it is hovering over cells. Each individual cell represents a textual and numerical value, either absolute or relative, in a workbook.
- 15Click the little triangle in the upper left corner between the columns and rows to select the whole worksheet. It is possible to copy or delete the whole worksheet now. For example, copying is useful when there are charts on a worksheet that are needed to be copied onto another worksheet.
- 16To navigate through the cells, left-click and drag horizontal and vertical scrollbars or click the left, right, up, and down buttons next to them. The up and down arrows are on the right-hand side of the screen around the vertical scrollbar. The left and right buttons are at the bottom of the screen around the horizontal scrollbar. These scrolling features are necessary if a worksheet has many columns.
- 17Click the bar at the top above the worksheet. The bar called a "formula bar". Familiarization with Microsoft Excel 2013 will yield memorizing certain formulas. It is possible just to type a formula in that bar to, for example, calculate a sum of certain cells. Besides typing formulas, there is the other option that is the "fx" button. It is possible to insert a function by clicking it.
- 18Click the "fx" button. A list of functions ("SUM", "AVERAGE", "HYPERLINK", etc.) will come up in a new window so that they can be quickly added into the formula bar.
- 19Let's review the bottom green section. In the right-hand bottom corner of the workbook, there are several different options. Drag the "Zoom" indicator to zoom in or out in the workbook. For people who have glasses to read, that come very handy. There are also "Page Break Preview", "Page Layout", and "Normal". Keep it in mind that clicking one or several of these will not affect data in the workbook, as these buttons only change the visual representation of the workbook.
- 20Click the "Sheet1" tab at the bottom to rename it. The first worksheet says "Sheet1" by default. It can be good idea to name it with respect to what the project is going to entail. Next to "Sheet1", there is a plus button that allows putting extra worksheets into this document. A worksheet or several worksheets form a workbook, which is the Excel document.
- 21Click the right-hand area at the top with a picture. This particular area actually allows signing into the Microsoft account. The Microsoft account is integrated into the Microsoft Office products. The integration allows accessing and purchasing different Microsoft products as well as working in the cloud right from the application. The cloud integration allows working on the computer and saving the document so that it can be accessed later from other computers, tablets, or cellphones that have the access to the Internet. The Microsoft account integration has been introduced in recent years in Microsoft products.
- 22Let's review the top right corner. Above the Microsoft account picture, there is the "Ribbon Display Options" button. Clicking the button allows customization of the visibility of tabs in the ribbon. The other button is "Microsoft Excel Help". The button is very handy even for people who have been working with Microsoft Excel for a long time. It is helpful in the way that it explains newly introduced functions and helps to remember something or to perform a task that is asked that has never been done before. There are also the "Minimize", "Restore Down", and "Close" buttons. "Minimize" minimizes the application to the taskbar, "Restore Down" restores the application window size to the previous one, and "Close" closes the application with a prompt to save the document on which you have been working.This concludes the tutorial on how to navigate the Microsoft Excel 2013 application. If you have any questions or comments on this video, please feel free to put them in the comment section below.
Video: Navigate Microsoft Excel 2013
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Article Info
Categories : Software
Recent edits by: VC, Alexander Avdeev
