Excel is started in one of several ways:

• There may be an icon on your screen (it is a bluish X).
• You may have to look for it by clicking on "Start" and then "Programs"
• If you locate an Excel file on your hard disk, a floppy, or a CD-ROM, you can open the file and start Excel at once by clicking on the file name. (You will know it is an Excel file because there is an icon with a blue X on it. Excel files also have file names that end in ".xls").
• If you encounter a reference to an Excel file in a web document, you can open it and start Excel by clicking on it, just like other links -- if you are using Internet Explorer. Netscape will not open Excel files automatically (indeed, it may not be a good idea to open Excel files without first thinking about where it came from, because there once was a sort of virus transmitted this way).

The Excel worksheet is a giant table, with rows labelled by numbers and columns labelled by letters. The elements of the table are called cells. Cells then have names, like A1 (the first cell on the first row) or C11 or W53 (which is not visible on the screen when Excel first starts -- you have to go look for it).

A cell may contain any kind of data or text, or a formula telling Excel how to compute what is displayed in the cell using data to be found in other cells. For example, we could fill in the cells as follows:

	A	B	C	D
1		Grocery Bill
2	Item	Number	Price per item	Cost
3	Apples	7	$0.35	=B3*C3
4	Canned Peas	3	$0.85	=B4*C4
5	Bars of Soap	4	$1.10	=B5*C5
6	Watermelon	1	$3.50	=B6*C6
7	Total	=SUM(B3:B6)		=SUM(D3:D6)
8	Average cost per item			=D7/B7

What you would see, however, would be the results of the multiplication (to find the cost), column sums (to find the number of items and total cost), and division (to determine the average cost per item). Once the table is set up, you can decrease the number of apples and change the price of a bar of soap and the calculations will be redone immediately. (This example is the file xlexampl.xls. You could go play with it for a minute, now). You surely can find uses for a program like this, in calculating student grades, figuring your taxes, or keeping track of the current value of your collection of catsup bottle labels.

Across the top row of the Excel display screen are a set of pull-down menus, labelled X, File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Tools, Data, ... . The most useful subcommands are:

• X has a subcommand "Restore" which will give you back the file you started with -- if you got totally mixed up, or were only playing and want to start over.
• File has the subcommands New, Open, Close, Save, Save As ... , and Print, which have the same meanings as in Word and other Windows programs. At the bottom of the column you will see files you have opened recently.
• Edit has the very useful subcommand Undo, which will get you out of messes sometimes. After you have selected a rectangular set of cells (by clicking the mouse in one corner, holding down the ear, and dragging to the other corner), Cut and Copy will make a copy on "the clipboard." The subcommand Delete does not copy to the clipboard. The information on the clipboard can then be put somewhere else using the subcommand Paste. (However, please see the discussion of relative and absolute references, below).
• The subcommands under View affect how the table is displayed.
• To insert a new row or column, select a row or column by clicking on the border (where the letters and numbers are), and then use the subcommands under Insert. The new row appears just above the selected row, and the new column appears to the left of the selected column.
• To use the subcommands under Format, you should select a row, column, or cell; then the corresponding subcommand will let you change alignment, number of decimal places displayed, as well as things like font and color.
• Under Data there is a useful subcommand Sort. To use it, select the part of the table you wish to sort -- for example, in the Grocery Bill example, click on Apples and drag to the cell D6 (the cost of the watermelon). We would not wish to do a rearrangement of the table including the header lines, and we want to keep the items and their prices together (you should try sorting after selecting other parts of the table. You will find the "Restore" command useful). Now click on Data -- Sort and a dialog box appears, in which you can specify whether to sort by the column labelled Item (giving a grocery bill in alphabetic order) or by another column (giving a grocery bill that puts the expensive items at the end, or that ends with the items that made the biggest contribution to the grocery bill).

There are two different ways to refer to a cell that needs to be explained here.

• Suppose cell C5 contains the very simple formula "=B3 + 1." Cell B3 is two rows higher and one column over from cell C5. If this formula is copied from the clipboard using the Select-Paste route (described above) into cell F11, what will appear there is "=E9+1" because cell E9 is two rows higher and one column over from cell F11. This is very useful, if your intention is to add each number in column B to the corresponding number in column C and put the result in column F: you need only to put "=B1+C1" into cell F1, and then copy the cell into the remaining cells in column F (F2 through 47, perhaps), which can be done with just a few clicks (select all the cells from F2 to F47 by one dragging motion, and then Paste!).
• But perhaps your intention is to add the current price of a first class stamp to every order. We put the stamp price into cell K1, for example, and then write a formula "=B1 + $K$1" in cell C1. When this is copied into cell C5, it becomes "=B5 + $K$1" -- the first number is a relative reference to another number on the same row, while the $K$1 always means the price of a stamp. Now you only have to change one entry in your worksheet when the postal rates go up, and everything else will change automatically.
  

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  Copyright 2001 J. P. Straley and S. S. Kovash