The Work Surface

Quick reference

• 00:04 This video focuses on the next most important thing to understand about Excel,
• 00:08 which is the work surface, where we actually get our work done.
• 00:12 Excel's a spreadsheet program, and
• 00:13 basically what that means is that everything we do is done in cells.
• 00:18 It looks like a worksheet, almost kind of like graph paper,
• 00:21 if you remember that from school.
• 00:23 So in Excel, everything is divided into rows and columns.
• 00:27 So you'll notice at the top here we have columns labeled A through F on the screen.
• 00:31 But they go way to the right from that.
• 00:34 And down the left-hand side, we see our row numbers.
• 00:36 And if I were to go and click on a cell, let's say this one here,
• 00:40 this would be cell E6.
• 00:41 And this is a key when we actually talk about cells.
• 00:43 We always refer to them using the column number first and the row number second.
• 00:48 So this cell here would be G9.
• 00:52 Up in the top left, beside the formula bar,
• 00:55 you'll see this box here called the name box, and
• 00:57 you'll notice that it actually has the name of the cell right in it.
• 01:01 So there's G9.
• 01:02 If I go and select on cell A9, it says A9 as well.
• 01:07 I can use this box in a couple of different ways.
• 01:09 I can actually click on it.
• 01:10 I could say, let's go to B2, and Enter, and it'll take me directly to that cell.
• 01:16 Or I could actually click the little drop down arrow, and you'll notice that it
• 01:20 actually gives me a hotlink to all of the named objects within an Excel file.
• 01:25 We're gonna talk more about these in later modules in the course.
• 01:29 Right now, you'll notice I have something called Table1.
• 01:31 And if I click on it, it will take me directly to the body area
• 01:34 of that particular table which is pretty handy.
• 01:38 Down at the bottom, you'll see that we have worksheets.
• 01:40 And in this file, we only have one, called the example.
• 01:43 But I can click on little + icon here and
• 01:46 that will allow me to create multiple new worksheets.
• 01:49 I can have as many worksheets as I want in one file.
• 01:52 And if I wanna go back to a previous one, I'll just go and
• 01:55 click it, using my left mouse button, and it'll take me right back there.
• 01:58 So that's pretty easy as well.
• 02:01 Now, one of the things we use a lot in Excel is the formula bar.
• 02:04 I've already mentioned it a couple times, and this is it right here.
• 02:08 You'll notice that when I select the cell like A9,
• 02:11 it actually tells me what's in that cell in the formula bar and it says soccer and
• 02:15 that's because A9 contains soccer.
• 02:18 If I were to move to B9, it would tell me 56, which is what's showing in the cell.
• 02:23 And in C9 it would show $8.99.
• 02:26 The reason this is important is because,
• 02:29 if we select a cell, I could go over here and I could type something in here.
• 02:32 I could type $6.99 and hit Enter.
• 02:35 And at that point,
• 02:36 it will put it into the cell, even though I actually used the formula bar to do it.
• 02:40 When I hit Enter, it automatically moves us down to the next cell.
• 02:44 Now I can also go and click on a cell and type in 595.
• 02:49 And you'll notice that as I'm typing in the cell,
• 02:51 it writes it into the formula bar as well.
• 02:53 So these two things work together, but
• 02:55 the key thing to remember is that if you ever want to know what's really in a cell,
• 02:59 like for example, where we have sports store inventory.
• 03:03 If I click on B5, you'll notice that even though we see stuff inside the cell,
• 03:08 the actual cell itself is blank because the data actually lives in A5.
• 03:12 So that's something to remember.
• 03:15 I'm gonna go and select these guys here, and I'm going to remove them.
• 03:19 But I should probably talk about how I did that.
• 03:21 I just left-clicked and dragged to select a range of cells.
• 03:26 And now, I can press the Delete key in order to clear the data out.
• 03:31 On the right-hand side of the user interface, we also have the scroll bars.
• 03:35 And you'll notice that you can click individual times and move up and
• 03:39 down using the scroll bar.
• 03:40 Or we can also click in the big space between the bar and one of the arrows
• 03:46 to make a big jump, and we can left-click and drag the scroll bar around as well.
• 03:50 So we've got a few different ways to work with that, and the same thing is true for
• 03:54 the left and right actions on the scroll bar down below.
• 03:58 Another piece that we want to look at, this little slider down at the bottom,
• 04:02 this is called the zoom slider.
• 04:04 So if we wanna make things bigger, we can click on the + and
• 04:07 we can actually magnify what we're looking at.
• 04:09 Or on the- to zoom down.
• 04:12 We can left-click and drag the zoom slider as well to make things bigger or smaller,
• 04:16 and if you can get it right back to the center, it'll go back to 100%.
• 04:20 This is a very quick way to go through and
• 04:21 actually scale some things if you need to see them.
• 04:25 Now the next thing I want to do is left-click and
• 04:28 drag down to select all of the items in my cost field.
• 04:31 And you'll notice that down here I have some information that's telling me
• 04:35 the average of the selected cells is 6.884.
• 04:38 And the count is 5, and we've got 34.42 as the sum.
• 04:43 If I go and pick up what's going on in the text,
• 04:45 it tells me the count is 5 five because it can't make an average or a sum of these.
• 04:49 This is a quick information area of your ribbon, and
• 04:53 it allows you to actually go and get some quick stats about what's going on.
• 04:58 And if you ever wanna change it, you can right-click on it and
• 05:00 you have all kinds of different options that you can add around.
• 05:04 So you'll see we've got average count, we can actually have the numerical count
• 05:08 minimum, maximum, or sums, or turn them off as well.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.