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About this lesson

Create your first Excel file, enter data and create a table.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the Excel workbook used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

First File - Completed.xlsx
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Quick reference

Topic

Creating your first Excel file.

When to use

Starting a new file for the first time.

Instructions

Excel Startup Choices

  • Open an existing file from the Most Recent list (at left)
  • Open an existing file from a folder (under the Most Recent List)
  • Create a new file from a blank file (top left of the large icons)
  • Create a new file based on one of Excel’s templates (the rest of the icons)

Starting a blank file

  • Create a Blank file from the main Excel window

Entering data

  • Select the first cell you want to work with and type in some text
  • Press Enter and the next cell will be selected
  • Enter some more text and press Enter

Creating a table of data

  • Select A4, type in “Animal” and press Tab (you should now be in B4)
  • Type in “Quantity” and press Tab (you should now be in C4)
  • Type in “Cost” and press Enter
  • At this point you’ll be taken to cell A5, the cell directly below the first cell you started tabbing from
  • Fill in some random animals, quantities and costs.  Use the tab keys to move to the next column, and the Enter key to go back to the start of the next row

Editing data

  • Select the cell to edit and press F2 to edit directly in the cell
  • Select the cell and click in the formula bar to edit in the formula bar
  • In either case the edits show up in both places

Saving your file

  • Go to the File tab and choose Save As
  • Browse to the location where you’d like to save the document and provide a name
  • The file will now be available on the Most Recent list when you re-open Excel
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  • 00:05 In this video,
  • 00:06 we're going to look at creating our very first Excel workbook from scratch.
  • 00:11 So to do that we're first gonna go and open Excel 2016.
  • 00:16 And it will open into a screen that looks like this.
  • 00:18 Now, you're gonna notice a couple of things here on the left hand side
  • 00:22 I have a list of recent files.
  • 00:25 You'll notice there's a difference between a couple of these.
  • 00:27 One of them is marked as pinned, the other one is marked as from today.
  • 00:30 So this is one that we used to shoot the previous video here.
  • 00:33 And you'll notice when I mouse over it,
  • 00:35 I have the option to click the pin, and actually pin it to
  • 00:38 stay in my list of workbooks that I want to actually use or not.
  • 00:43 This list will change out and will rotate through as new workbooks are opened.
  • 00:48 Anything that is pinned will actually stay in this list here.
  • 00:51 In addition, on the right hand side, we also have a bunch of templates.
  • 00:54 Now, to be fair, your list may look different than mine.
  • 00:58 This depends on what your servers have access to,
  • 01:00 but you'll notice that there are a bunch of pre-built templates that Microsoft has
  • 01:04 provided to help you actually get up and running very quickly.
  • 01:09 Now, we're gonna do our stuff from scratch, so basically,
  • 01:12 what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up at the top here.
  • 01:14 We're gonna choose blank workbook.
  • 01:17 And that will load us into a completely blank workbook ready to go, so
  • 01:21 that we can start doing what we wanna do.
  • 01:23 Now, were gonna build a sports store inventory listing here.
  • 01:27 So I'm gonna select in cell A1, and
  • 01:29 I'm just gonna start typing Sports Store Inventory, and
  • 01:32 you'll notice that it's actually showing up in two places.
  • 01:36 It's showing up in cell as I'm typing, it's also showing up in the formula bar.
  • 01:41 The cursor is flashing inside the cell to say I'm still in edit mode.
  • 01:45 When I hit Enter, it will commit that to the cell, and drop me down one cell.
  • 01:50 So, let's start typing in Ball, and you can watch in the formula bar as this goes,
  • 01:54 Inventory, and we'll hit Enter to drop-down one cell again.
  • 01:58 And now let's give our little table here some headers, we'll say Ball Type,
  • 02:02 but this time instead of hitting Enter, I'm gonna hit Tab to move to the right.
  • 02:07 Then we'll see Quantity, and Cost.
  • 02:11 And now we'll hit Enter, that'll drop us down here.
  • 02:15 So now we can enter our next item, we'll go with Soccer and hit Tab.
  • 02:18 Say there's 56 at 8.99, and we'll hit Enter.
  • 02:24 So let's go with football.
  • 02:27 And Tab, and 84, and Tab, and 7.97,
  • 02:32 and Enter, and Basketball, and 21,
  • 02:37 and 7.25, and Baseball, and
  • 02:41 we'll go with 65 of those at $5.23,
  • 02:46 and Softball, add 52 of them at $4.98.
  • 02:52 So we've created a nice little listing of our inventory products.
  • 02:56 Now, we're looking at this and we're saying boy this is interesting, but
  • 03:00 I think that maybe this column is not quite wide enough because I can't see
  • 03:03 the final L on basketball.
  • 03:05 So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open this column up a little bit,
  • 03:10 and there we go.
  • 03:11 Or, if I wanna open up to exactly as wide as is needed,
  • 03:14 I can double-click on this line between column A and column B, and
  • 03:18 it will resize to the exact length that is needed for the largest piece of text.
  • 03:23 So that's kind of a helpful thing.
  • 03:27 At this point, we wanna try and
  • 03:28 figure out, well, what do we do if we did make a spelling mistake on this?
  • 03:33 Maybe we actually wanted to see something that said,
  • 03:37 in this case here we've got Football, Basketball, Baseball, Softball.
  • 03:40 Maybe we want it to say Soccer ball.
  • 03:42 We've got a couple of different options here.
  • 03:44 We can click on the cell, and we can click after the name Soccer in the formula bar,
  • 03:51 and then we can type in Ball, and hit Enter, or if we didn't like that, we could
  • 03:56 say you know what, no wait a minute, we're gonna name this after the sport after all.
  • 03:59 We don't need to say that it's a ball type and call it Soccer Ball.
  • 04:02 So let's go and select directly in a cell.
  • 04:05 What we'll do is we'll select it, and then we'll press F2,
  • 04:09 and F2 allows us to edit directly in cell.
  • 04:13 So we'll just go and delete those off, and say Enter, and
  • 04:17 notice as we do that it actually showing up in both places, and
  • 04:20 that's gonna be consistent with Excel as you go forward.
  • 04:24 The last thing that we wanna do is we're happy with our document.
  • 04:27 What we're gonna do now is we're gonna hit the save as icon, and
  • 04:31 this will give us the option to save our file.
  • 04:34 So I'll just go save this on the desktop as
  • 04:39 Sports Store Inventory, and say Save.
  • 04:44 And now, what you'll see is, when I close my file and I reopen Excel,
  • 04:51 that file will actually be showing in the most recent list, you can see,
  • 04:55 here it is from the Desktop, so I could open it up, and edit it, and use it again.

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