The Work Surface

Quick reference

• 00:04 Now, the next thing that we need to understand is Excel's work surface,
• 00:08 the actual spreadsheet grid that we're going to be working with.
• 00:11 Now, you can see it here.
• 00:13 It's this nice little area that has this grid that looks very much like graph
• 00:16 paper, if you remember that from school.
• 00:18 And it's broken up into rows and columns.
• 00:22 Now, the thing to understand about this is that every one of our columns has a letter
• 00:26 indicator across the top here.
• 00:28 And you can see that on my screen right now,
• 00:31 I'm going from column A all the way out to AC, but they go way, way, way past that.
• 00:36 And we've got rows from 1 all the way down to 37 on my screen right now,
• 00:40 although that will go up to 1,048,576.
• 00:43 So there's lots of rows and
• 00:45 lots of columns in an Excel spreadsheet that we can fill with data.
• 00:50 When we actually start looking at this, though,
• 00:52 we need to understand how we actually talk about it.
• 00:55 So if I go and select this cell using my mouse here,
• 00:58 you'll notice that I've selected cell F8.
• 01:01 And that is the key thing to understand when we're referring to cells in Excel.
• 01:06 We always refer to the column first, the letter F, and then the row second, 8.
• 01:11 So if I go and take a look at, say, this cell,
• 01:14 this is going to be I9 and this one here would be F11.
• 01:19 Now, the next thing to realize here is if you're ever in doubt on that, you want to
• 01:23 remind yourself, you can look up in the top here in what we call the name box.
• 01:27 And the name box simply refers to the name of the cell.
• 01:30 This is the name of this particular cell, is F11.
• 01:33 Now, the name box can be used in a couple of different ways here.
• 01:37 You can use it just to read the cell reference, but
• 01:41 you can also use it to navigate to things.
• 01:43 So if I want to go to cell B10, I can type in B10, hit Enter, and
• 01:47 it will actually jump me into the cell that contains 84, right?
• 01:51 So here we are, we're in column B, row 10.
• 01:54 The name box can also be used with a dropdown to see other objects that
• 01:58 are inside your Excel file.
• 02:00 Now, in this one, we actually have a table called Table1.
• 02:03 And you'll notice that I can actually click on this, boom, there we go.
• 02:07 And it actually goes and selects all of the data inside the table as well.
• 02:10 So this is kind of a cool little thing here that lets you understand what's in
• 02:14 your workbook, as well as allows you to read what cells you're actually working
• 02:18 with, as well as allows you to jump around and navigate.
• 02:21 So it's kind of a neat little piece here that we can actually use.
• 02:25 Now, the next thing I want to talk about is worksheet tabs.
• 02:28 So this is one worksheet.
• 02:30 And you'll see down the bottom here, this is called Example, it's got a name.
• 02:34 There's only one worksheet in the file so far, but if I click this plus button,
• 02:38 I can actually create multiple worksheets.
• 02:41 And you can have as many worksheets inside a workbook as you want,
• 02:44 create as many as you need.
• 02:46 It's helpful to name them, so right-click and
• 02:48 rename them to make them something sensible.
• 02:50 But if you want to move from one worksheet to another,
• 02:53 all you need to do is just click it with the mouse and
• 02:56 you can get right back to where you started, so that's pretty cool as well.
• 03:00 Another really important part of what we're going to work with here is
• 03:04 the formula bar, okay?
• 03:05 So that's this area up the top here,
• 03:07 you can see the tooltip texts come up as I moused over them.
• 03:11 And the reason why the formula bar is super, super important is this is one of
• 03:16 the areas where you can actually enter data into Excel.
• 03:19 So for example, let's say that I decide I want to have some data in cell E9.
• 03:24 I can go and click in the formula bar and I can type in 6.99.
• 03:28 And I'll hit Enter.
• 03:29 And you'll notice that I typed it into the formula bar, and when I hit Enter,
• 03:34 it put it in the cell and dropped it down.
• 03:36 Now, here's the thing though, I can also go and click on the cell and type 5.75.
• 03:42 And what I want you to notice here is that even though I'm entering things
• 03:46 directly in the cell, it's also putting it in the formula bar as I go.
• 03:50 These two things are always kept in sync.
• 03:54 And when I hit Enter, it will commit it to the cell and drop down a row.
• 03:58 Notice that if I mouse back up, we can see what's in the cell.
• 04:01 We can also see it in the formula bar itself.
• 04:04 And this is going to become really, really important,
• 04:08 because what you see inside a cell is not necessarily always what's inside the cell.
• 04:13 And to look at that, I'm going to actually go and click on cell B5.
• 04:18 Notice that B5 seems to contain the latter half of inventory.
• 04:23 It doesn't necessarily have the I, but it's got the N-V-E-N-T-O-R-Y.
• 04:27 But what's in the actual cell itself?
• 04:29 Well, according to the formula bar, nothing, why?
• 04:31 Well, because this data is actually spilled from cell A5.
• 04:35 The entire set of data is in A5, and it's actually spilled out across the next cell.
• 04:40 So the big thing to realize here is that cell B5 is actually blank, where A5,
• 04:45 as we can see in the formula bar, has this entire string of text, okay?
• 04:50 So this is a really good thing to be able to actually go and take a look at things.
• 04:53 The other thing you should know about the formula bar,
• 04:56 if you're in here and you decide that actually this was supposed to be 6.89.
• 05:00 You can edit things right there as well or in the cell the same way as if you
• 05:03 are actually going and entering something to begin with.
• 05:06 Now, I'm just going to get rid of these cells.
• 05:09 I'm just going to left click and drag, select everything here, and
• 05:12 I'm going to press the Delete key to make that go away,
• 05:15 just because I want to clean up a little bit here before I go on.
• 05:18 The next part of the user interface that I want to show you is
• 05:21 way across on the right-hand side, okay?
• 05:24 So we have these vertical scroll bars.
• 05:26 Now whether or not these appear on your version of Excel depends a little bit on
• 05:30 how you've got your Windows operating system set up.
• 05:33 Because in some versions, they are actually hidden by default and
• 05:36 you have to mouse over them to see them.
• 05:38 You'll notice that it has an arrow, which I can scroll up, nothing happens.
• 05:42 If I scroll down, it will actually scroll the entire worksheet grid for me.
• 05:46 I can then click back up to move up.
• 05:48 I can click in the bar to make a big jump somewhere, or I can even left-click and
• 05:52 drag the bar and move it around a little bit as well.
• 05:55 So there's lots of different options here for working with your scroll bars.
• 05:59 In addition, I have a horizontal scroll bar down the end here that very much works
• 06:04 in the same way as the vertical, it just goes from side to side.
• 06:07 Again, if you don't see these, mouse over the area, they'll pop up, or
• 06:11 take a look to figure out how you can change your Windows settings to make these
• 06:15 always appear.
• 06:16 The next component that I want to call out in the user interface here is this one
• 06:20 down the very bottom here.
• 06:22 So this is the zoom slider.
• 06:24 And you'll notice that we can actually go, and we can click negative and
• 06:28 make it go smaller, so we zoom out to see more.
• 06:30 We can also go and click to make it bigger, so we can actually really zoom in.
• 06:35 We can left-click and drag the little bar to really zoom back and forth.
• 06:39 And if we come back and click on the very line in the center,
• 06:42 it'll take us about to 98 right now for me.
• 06:44 So I can just left-click and drag and try and get this back to 100,
• 06:48 there we go, okay?
• 06:49 So that allows you to quickly navigate through some different views of this and
• 06:53 scroll in and out of your data very, very quickly,
• 06:55 if you need to see what kind of shape it's in or zoom in.
• 06:58 The last thing I want to call out, I'm going to go and
• 07:01 select a bunch of cells here, just left-click on all these cost cells.
• 07:05 And you'll notice on the bottom here, I get an average, 6.884,
• 07:10 a count of 5, and a sum of 34.42.
• 07:12 This is what we call the quick info area, and it's entirely customizable.
• 07:16 I can come down, right-click on it,
• 07:18 and I can choose any of the different pieces that I might want to see in here,
• 07:22 so average, count, numerical count, minimums, maximums.
• 07:26 Or I can uncheck these and turn them off as well.
• 07:28 What's nice about these, though, is that they show contextual information for
• 07:33 what's been selected.
• 07:34 So for example, if I go and select all this text here,
• 07:36 you'll notice that it gives me a count.
• 07:39 It doesn't give me an average or sum,
• 07:40 because that doesn't make sense in the context of what we have here, okay?
• 07:44 So that's the overview of the work surface that we're going to be using throughout
• 07:48 this course.

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