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About this lesson
Create your first Excel file, enter data and create a table.
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Exercise files
Download the Excel workbook used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
First File - Completed.xlsx15.6 KB
Quick reference
First File
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
- 00:04 In this video,
- 00:05 we're going to take a look at creating our very own first Excel from scratch.
- 00:09 So to do that, I'm just going to press my Windows key to bring up my start menu.
- 00:13 And I'm going to open Excel, and I'm going to launch the Office 365 version of Excel.
- 00:19 Now you'll notice that when I actually come in here that I have a few different
- 00:22 things going on.
- 00:23 I've got a little navigation area on the left hand side that allows me to go into
- 00:28 Home or New or Open.
- 00:29 I've got a recent files area, and you can see here that the last file I was
- 00:34 working on was Navigating the Interface, which I saved five minutes ago.
- 00:39 I've also got some templates up the top here.
- 00:42 Now one of the things is kind of interesting is that when I mouse over
- 00:45 this, a little pin icon comes up.
- 00:47 And if this was really important workbook to me,
- 00:49 I could actually pin this item to the list.
- 00:52 And you'll notice it changed it to say that it happened just now,
- 00:55 and it's got this a little unpin icon.
- 00:58 And what you'll find is that when I go to the Pinned area, it shows up on this list.
- 01:03 So, this means that anytime I open Excel, I can come over to Pinned, and
- 01:07 my most important files will be retained here for me.
- 01:10 Where the Recent list cycles through all of the different
- 01:13 items that I've been working on.
- 01:15 Now, if I don't want to have this pinned, I can go to pin,
- 01:17 and I can choose to un-pin it.
- 01:20 It clears it from the pin list.
- 01:22 If I go back to Recent, it's still there.
- 01:25 Now, there's a bunch of templates that we could use to get up and running quickly.
- 01:29 But you know what?
- 01:30 What I really want to do here,
- 01:31 is I want to start from scratch with a blank workbook.
- 01:33 So I'm gonna click on Blank Workbook, and it's gonna take me directly into Excel.
- 01:37 And now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and
- 01:40 start building a nice little table of data for a sports store.
- 01:45 So, this is gonna be my Sports Store Inventory.
- 01:49 And you can see that I just clicked the cell and started typing.
- 01:52 And as I did, my data is being put into the actual cells,
- 01:56 as well as into the formula bar.
- 01:59 And when I hit Enter, it will commit it and take me down one cell.
- 02:03 I can now type in Ball and notice that it's showing in both places.
- 02:07 And as I type Inventory,
- 02:09 you can see that it still shows up in both of formula bar and the cell.
- 02:13 We'll go hit Enter, and press Enter one more time to drop down to cell A8.
- 02:18 And I'm now gonna start giving a nice little header table or header row for
- 02:22 my table.
- 02:22 I'm gonna go with Ball Type.
- 02:24 And I'll press Tab, we'll go Quantity, Tab and Cost.
- 02:31 And then, instead of pressing Tab,
- 02:33 I'm gonna press Enter to go down to the next row, A9.
- 02:36 And now I'm gonna entering my data.
- 02:38 I'm gonna go with Soccer, and we'll put 56 of those in here at a cost of 8.99.
- 02:44 And then I'll hit Enter again because I've been using the Tab key all the way across.
- 02:49 We'll go with Football, and we'll Tab,
- 02:53 84 of those, Tab, 7.97, and Enter.
- 02:57 And again, I'm gonna continue on the same little thrust here.
- 03:01 We'll go with Basketball, 21 basketballs at 7.25.
- 03:07 We're gonna go with Baseball.
- 03:11 And we'll do 65 baseballs at 5.23.
- 03:16 And we'll go with the Softball, and
- 03:18 there's gonna be 52 of those at the cost of 4.98.
- 03:22 And now when I hit Enter, everything looks pretty good,
- 03:26 except that it doesn't look like I spelled Basketball correctly.
- 03:30 And if I go and select on the cell, we can see that,
- 03:32 indeed, I did spell it correctly.
- 03:33 It's got two l's, it just doesn't show here.
- 03:35 So the challenge is that this column is not wide enough to show my data.
- 03:40 Now I'm gonna show you a couple of different things we could do here.
- 03:42 Right between A and B, I can left-click and
- 03:45 drag this column a little bit wider, and it'll actually show everything I need.
- 03:51 Or, I can mouse up between these two columns and
- 03:53 I can double-click on that line.
- 03:55 And what will happen then is it actually makes it exactly wide enough for
- 03:59 the widest piece of text in the column,
- 04:00 which happens to be Sports Store Inventory.
- 04:03 That's a little bit too much.
- 04:04 So I'm gonna left-click and I'm gonna drag this back down here as well.
- 04:09 Now at this point, I might start to look at my data, and I say, hmm,
- 04:12 you know what, maybe I'm not happy with something.
- 04:14 Everything else has ball in here.
- 04:16 I want to see soccer ball.
- 04:17 So how do I do it?
- 04:19 I've got a couple of different ways.
- 04:20 I can double-click on the cell, will take me into edit mode,
- 04:24 then I can start typing.
- 04:25 No, I'm just gonna press Escape and throw that edit away.
- 04:29 I could click in the Formula bar and start typing, but
- 04:32 I'm also gonna press Escape and throw that away as well.
- 04:35 Or I could press F2 from the keyboard,
- 04:38 which will take me directly in here, so that now I can type ball.
- 04:43 Except at this point, I look here and go, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense.
- 04:45 All of these are balls, this is a sport type, so you know what?
- 04:50 I'm gonna press Control Z to undo that.
- 04:53 So we have the ability to change our data as we need to as we go around.
- 04:58 Now, everything looks good, I'm happy with the way this looks.
- 05:02 So what I'm gonna do is I'm now gonna go to my File menu, and
- 05:05 I'm gonna choose Save As.
- 05:08 And I'm gonna save this right now.
- 05:10 Gonna Browse, and I'm just gonna go and put a copy of this right onto my Desktop.
- 05:15 And I'm gonna call this one Sports Store.
- 05:19 Then we'll say Save, and now it saves it for me.
- 05:23 I just want to show you what happens now when I close Excel.
- 05:27 And let's go and click my start menu and reopen Excel.
- 05:32 And you'll notice that when it launches me into the window,
- 05:35 Sports Store is saved on my Desktop, it's in my Recent.
- 05:38 If this is important to me, I will click the little pin icon.
- 05:42 I can now go over to my Pinned, so
- 05:43 that every time I open this up, I can go directly into my Sports Store.
- 05:47 And it brings me right up to the same place that I was.
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