IT Services

EXCEL – SPREADSHEET BASICS

• Pointing and clicking the mouse pointer on the desired cell
• Using the directional arrow keys on the keyboard
• Click on the Edit menu and click on ”Go To” (or Ctrl+G)
• Typing in the name box the desired cell address and striking “Enter” on the keyboard

After keying in the data you wish to be displayed it must be transferred to actually be IN the cell. Otherwise, Excel thinks that you are still in input mode.

• Striking the “Enter” key on the keyboard (automatically moves the cursor down one row)

• Striking one of the directional arrow keys on the keyboard (also moves the cursor one cell in the direction of the arrow)

• Click on another cell location

•  Press the “Esc” (escape) key on the keyboard.

•  Click the “cancel” red “x” to the left of the formula bar (see above).

•  Highlight the cell’s contents and hit the delete key or backspace key on the keyboard.

Once data has been transferred (the Enter key has been hit after inputting the information), making corrections to that data requires a few more steps. The following are your options for editing a cell’s contents:

• Hit the delete key on the keyboard

• Edit menu/”Clear”/”Contents”

• Hit “F2” or double-click on the cell, position the cursor and strike either delete or backspace to delete out characters.

• Retyping (when you begin typing in a cell, any characters that were there will be replaced with what is being typed).

NOTE:  Pressing the spacebar does NOT erase or delete a cell’s contents!!! The computer sees a press of the spacebar the same as a press of a character key. The only difference is that the spacebar character is not visible on your screen.

ü     Click on the cell, or click and drag to highlight the cell range

ü     Click on the Edit menu and click on “Cut” or “Copy” OR click on the Cut button or the Copy button on the toolbar.

ü     Paste the information by clicking on the Edit menu and clicking on “Paste” or by clicking on the Paste button on the toolbar.

Cells and cell ranges can be pasted into the same spreadsheet, a new spreadsheet (as seen in the above example), in a word processing document, or into any other document type that runs in the Windows environment.

Cutting (moving) removes the highlighted information from its original location and puts it in a new location. Copying takes a picture of the highlighted information and puts that image in an additional location to make two copies of the same information. Of course, cutting and copying are followed by “Paste.”

If you set it to print page numbers (established elsewhere) and you want to control which number it begins numbering with, this is where it is done.

Scaling allows you to shrink or expand your spreadsheet. The “Adjust to:” option is to your hardcopy what “zoom” is to your viewed image.

The “Fit to:” option is for those spreadsheets that have just a few rows or columns printing on another sheet or when you have a two-page spreadsheet that you want to force to fit on one page without having to change the margin settings.

In the “Margins” section of Page Setup, you can change the left, right, top and bottom margins of your spreadsheet.  You can also set it to center your spreadsheet within your page horizontally (from side to side) and vertically (top to bottom).

After clicking the “Header/Footer” tab to create a customized header/footer, a separate dialog box appears broken into three sections. Each section is labeled as to whether the lines in that section will be centered or left/right justified (which side the lines will be up against).

Seven buttons are included in the dialog box to make information that is usually customary for headers and footers easy to include.  The buttons are as follows:

After the header/footer is setup, click “OK” to accept the changes and the Page Setup dialog box will again be on your screen.

When a spreadsheet is more than one page, often it becomes difficult to follow because the headers are by default only included on the first page. This can be changed by typing in the row(s) or column(s) that are to be printed on all pages of the hardcopy.  (see example below)