The Work Surface

Quick reference

• 00:03 In this video we are going to focus on the next
• 00:06 important piece that we need to understand about Excel and that's understanding its work surface.
• 00:12 Excel is a spreadsheet program. Which basically means that everything in the entire program is done in cells and we can see a
• 00:20 picture of our cells right here, all these little drawings with the little squares on them, this is our collection of cells which is contained on the
• 00:28 active worksheet that we're looking at. You'll notice across the top that we have some column headers ABCDEFG and so on and down the
• 00:36 side our row headers of 1234567 and so on as well. Basically what those are is
• 00:42 these are coordinate map-points that we can actually use to locate any cell. So if I were to say
• 00:47 I want to find cell G3
• 00:50 it would be right here. It's in column G
• 00:53 row 3. I can actually see that through some different areas as well. You'll
• 00:58 notice up here that when I've selected my cell it actually comes back with G3.
• 01:03 G7, I8 this is giving me the name of the reference. But you can't always rely on that because unfortunately or fortunately sometimes
• 01:11 we actually do different things in here. This is called the name box and allows us to actually define names as well for certain cells.
• 01:19 In addition if I select multiple cells it just tells me what the starting cell is in the top left.
• 01:25 If I look here, if I click this drop down list we actually have a table in here.
• 01:29 This will allow me to quickly jump to it as well because these cells here are all
• 01:33 named table 1. Even though it covers from A5 through to C9.
• 01:39 So that's how we actually read the grid itself. You'll notice down the bottom that we have some tabs.
• 01:44 Sheet 1, this is worksheet 2, there is nothing on this one and worksheet 3
• 01:50 But we can actually quickly cycle through those tabs to see what our different worksheets have on them.
• 01:56 We've already looked at the name box, up beside it here is the formula bar.
• 02:01 And what the formula bar does is it actually gives us the contents of the cells. So if I click on cell A1
• 02:06 it tells me that it says Sports Store Inventory. A2 says Ball Inventory.
• 02:12 B6 says 84 and you might think well that's a little bit ridiculous because really, I mean I can see what's in the grid. Well not always.
• 02:20 Here is what happens here is that if I click on this cell its got a formula in it that reads
• 02:25 =SUMTable1[Quantity]) and what it's doing is it's actually summing up
• 02:29 all of these cells for me but it puts the output in the worksheet grid. So what the formula bar
• 02:34 allows us to do is to actually go back and look at, what are the contents of the cell really
• 02:39 including here, not what are they showing me on the outside.
• 02:44 We also have some other pieces that we can work with. We've got scroll bars down here,
• 02:48 we can drag the scroll bar over to the right or we can use the
• 02:52 arrowheads to move it further across the right because spreadsheets are massive.
• 02:56 We can scroll all the way back to the left
• 02:59 or we can scroll down as well and back up.
• 03:03 You'll notice that there is over a million rows in an Excel spreadsheet now so you can have a lot of
• 03:07 data that's in here so the scroll bars will help you quickly move around.
• 03:12 We have a zoom slider if your spreadsheet gets really really big and you click the minus button you can actually zoom it in or out rather and
• 03:18 take a look at what's going on on it. Or you can zoom it back in. If you need to
• 03:23 you can grab the scroll bar and zoom it way quicker if you need to have bigger numbers.
• 03:27 And this little point in the center is where our 100% is. You can't always get there with a single click
• 03:32 but then you can use your +/- to actually drill into it to get it exactly where you need it as well.
• 03:38 There is another little piece here, right now is blank it's actually going to show up right down here
• 03:42 when I select some cells. This is called the quick info area
• 03:46 and if you watch this now, I'm going to select 3 cells, drag it with a mouse and it
• 03:50 comes back and tells me the average is 53.66. There are 3 cells that I've
• 03:55 counted here or the count that it's given me. I've selected 3 cells and it summed up to 161
• 04:00 and you'll notice that as I change this selection it will constantly
• 04:04 do that for me telling me the sum is now 278 which happens to be the amount of my
• 04:08 formula down here. It works as well on anything numeric.
• 04:12 Text space it will only give me a count because of course it can't sum it or add it up and whatnot.
• 04:18 It's a way to get some really really quick information about the contents of your cell.
• 04:23 Something else that's important to realize is that in Excel we have context
• 04:27 sensitive help. Now you've already seen the Ribbon in one of our previous videos but
• 04:31 notice what happens when I click somewhere inside my table. There is a new tab that pops up. This is
• 04:37 called the contextual tab. It will only show up when I'm inside an actual proper formatted table.
• 04:42 When I click outside it goes away, when I click inside the tools that are available to tables popup. Okay so that's one way of seeing
• 04:50 context sensitive help. The other way is if I right click on any cell
• 04:55 it will give me a menu that is customized to the things that I can do with that cell.
• 05:00 You'll notice there are some items that are grayed out. They're not available but if you notice
• 05:03 this menu is actually going to look slightly different than the one that I
• 05:07 click on when I right click in a cell beside it. It looks different. There's not as many
• 05:11 commands and that has to do with the fact that some of the cells in here
• 05:14 have things available to the tables where outside it doesn't.
• 05:19 So context sensitive help all over the place. If you click on a cell and it pops up a context sensitive tab, like this, you know you've got
• 05:27 context sensitive help. If you right click on any cell you get a list of shortcuts and commands that are available for that selection of data.
• 05:35 So that's how we go about reading the Excel work surface from how to read cells to what can we actually do with them.

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