A Microsoft Excel workbook is really a container, a bit like a folder. Each Excel workbook contains one or more worksheets and it is the worksheet that is the actual container of your information. Worksheets are identified by a tab which carries the name of the sheet. Clicking a tab will activate that particular sheet.
Microsoft Excel measures row height in points, the same units used to measure font size. When creating reports this makes it easy to relate the height of rows to the required line spacing. This means that you can increase the line spacing simply by increasing the height of your rows.
In this article, we will look at Excel selection techniques which involve using the mouse in conjunction with the keyboard. One of the easiest and most useful is click followed by Shift-click. This is particularly handy for highlighting large ranges of data since it allows you to simply click on two opposite corners of the rectangular range of cells which you want to select. To perform this technique, first click in the top left cell of the range you want to select. Next, make sure that the bottom right cell of the proposed range is visible. Finally, holding down the Shift key, click in the bottom right cell. All the cells between the two clicks will then be highlighted.
As well as using and modifying Excel’s built-in cell styles, you also have the facility of creating your own. One simple way of doing this is to highlight a range of cells and apply all the formatting attributes that you want to add to your style and then turn those attributes into a cell style. When you create your cell style, Excel will pick up all the attributes from the highlighted cells and include them in the style. Let’s take an example; let’s say we want to create a cell style for headings with text angled at 45 degrees.
Excel contains a wide range of functions which are conveniently arranged into categories. The COUNT functions are found in the statistical category. There are five of them; COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, COUNTIF and COUNTIFS. We will examine the COUNTIF and COUNTIFS functions in another article. In this article, we will be looking at COUNT, COUNTA and COUNTBLANK.
Concatenation is the simply the process of stringing together different pieces of information to form a new piece of data. For example, if say we have columns containing people’s title and first name and another containing their last name, we might use concatenation to create their full name. All we need to do is to string together the title, first name and last name, separated by spaces.
There are essentially two ways of inserting cells into a worksheet: you can either insert entire rows or columns or you can insert individual cells. Whenever you insert entire rows or columns, the number of rows or columns that you highlight will correspond to the number inserted.
Excel boasts a very wide variety of formats that you can apply to your cells. Naturally, when creating your worksheets you want your formatting to be consistent. Cell Styles provide you with an excellent way of achieving this.
The alignment section of the Home Tab of the Excel ribbon contains a number of options relating to the way in which your data is position within the cell. Perhaps the most familiar and the most frequently used buttons in this section are the three relating to the horizontal position your data: left, centre and right. However you\’ll notice that when you click in the cells of an unformatted worksheet, none of these three icons is highlighted, which indicates that none of them is the default. The reason for this is that Excel treats data differently depending on the data type.
When formatting text within an Excel worksheet, you have the choice of working at the cell level or at the text level. If you wish to work at the cell level you simply highlight one or more cells and choose your format settings. Any formatting that you choose will then apply to all text within the cell or cells.
