Introduction to MS-Excel OR MICRO SOFT EXCEL
It is a Windows based spreadsheet developed by Microsoft Corporation. It includes all features of a spreadsheet package like recalculation, graphs and functions. It provides many statistical, financial and scientific functions. It is used in many scientific and engineering environments for analyzing data.
Important features :
• Workbooks are the files in which worksheets related to a project are held.
• Like other applications, Excel has toolbars, shortcut menus, auto correct, online help and wizards.
• Excel can maintain large volume of data. A worksheet can contain 65,536 rows and 256 columns and a single cell can contain a maximum of 255 characters and one workbook can contain a maximum of 255 worksheets.
Contents of a worksheet :
Worksheets are used to list and analyse data. Data can be entered and edited on several worksheets simultaneously and perform calculations based on data from multiple worksheets.
• Rows, columns and cells : Rows are numbered from top to bottom and columns are labeled with letters from left to right. A cell is the intersection of a row and a column and is referred by the column name and row number combination. Eg. first cell is referred to as A1 which means column A and row 1 etc.,
• Menus and toolbars: Like in MS Word, Excel also has Menus and various options or tasks one can use to perform. Toolbars are usually shortcuts for menu items.
• Sheets : Excel has multiple pages labeled as Sheet1, Sheet2 and so on. These are the worksheets where the user performs the operations. These can be renamed as per the requirement of the user.
• Formulas : An ‘=’ sign is entered before a formula and without this sign, the entry is treated as text label. Many arithmetic, scientific, logical operations can be performed using formulas.
• The data entered in the cells can be edited, altered, deleted. Similarly, rows and columns can also be added, deleted. Data can be cut/copied and pasted within the work sheet/book or another workbook.
• The data in the excel worksheet can be represented in graphical form such as bar charts, pie diagrams etc.
• Filter option is available to filter the data according to the column labels and contents of similarity in the columns.
• Auto fill, auto sum options available.
Data types used in Excel :
Text data type is a combination of letters of alphabet, special characters like !, ? and numbers
Number data type consists of digits 0 to 9 and decimal point. Calculations can be done with numeric data.
Date & time data type. These are taken as numbers in Excel. Dates can be entered in different formats and calculations possible.
