Excel basics

Use these questions as a learning tool. Treat them like a quiz. Answer in your mind, and using the tool, and writing them down. Make it stick!

• Quiz yourself
• How much can you remember without this list (below)?
• What is missing from this list?
• Don’t just go through the posted notes to answer this. First, recall everything you can, and try it out. Then review notes to recall what you missed.
• Develop the “muscle memory” of using the tool

• What are the different components of a notebook?
• How would you add a textbox?
• What are the different styles that go into formatting a cell? How do you change those?
  • left, right center
  • top, middle, bottom
  • indent
  • cell color, text color
  • text font, size
  • bold, underline, italic
  • change numeric style, number of digits displayed, currency
• Open, new, save, save as
• Moving around: think through how to move, highlight, select. Review it mentally
  • go to a cell (mouse, arrows, directly)
  • select with mouse
  • select with arrows
  • go to ends of array of data (top, left, bottom, right): mouse, keyboard
  • select to ends of array of data (top, left, bottom, right): mouse, keyboard
  • select whole rows/colums
  • fill
  • insert, delete, clear, move: cells, rows, columns
• Keyboard shortcuts: open, save, cut, copy, paste, undo, bold, underline, italic
• Calculations
  • How to make it pretty, name, value, units, highlight, color, borders, white space
  • + - / * ^
  • important functions
    • exp, log, ln, log10, pi, sum, average…