Microsoft Excel is an application for working with spreadsheets.
For 2023 of January, it is included in the Microsoft 365 subscription. Excel is excellent for solving many tasks, from elementary ones – addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, sum calculation, etc., to more complex ones – VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP, pivot tables and diagrams.
What is Excel used for and who will it be useful for?
Excel can be useful to every office employee who works on a computer, as it simplifies life, in general it is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses. Excel is ideal for most tasks, but you do not need to think that it is a panacea for solving any problem, if you have a large company, then it is more rational to use professional software for a specific area.
In Excel, you can keep management records in a small company, while once you configure the data, it will be collected automatically, which is very convenient and saves a huge amount of time when processing information.
Who are our Excel lessons for?
Our lessons are designed both to explore individual program features and to solve specific tasks. Here you will find an explanation of how to use a specific function, as well as specific examples of solving a particular business problem. For your convenience, each lesson will be presented both in the form of an article on our website and in video format on YouTube in the official channel.
Document structure
The Microsoft Excel table consists of columns of rows, a cell is formed at the intersection of each column and row. Each cell has its own address, which is formed from the column names and the row name. To use the contents of a cell in any formula, it is necessary to refer to a specific cell address, for example, A1 / B6, etc.
Note that if you have any data in the cells, use only a reference to this cell in the formulas, and not the data itself.
Each Excel document contains 1,048,576 lines. At the same time, the columns are numbered in Latin letters, starting with A and ending with XFD (in Excel settings, you can switch to the numeric numbering option). There are 3 entities in the program:
- Content or document content.
- Formats or how the data looks like.
- Formulas or functions with which all calculations are carried out.
Let’s focus a little more specifically on each entity. Content is the data that you enter Excel cells, it can be text, graphic, digital information. It is with this data, then you can work using the full potential of the program. Remember that Excel can work not only with numbers as a “calculator”, but can also process text information, it can convert numbers to letters, lowercase letters to uppercase, etc. it all depends on your knowledge of the program.
Formats are how the content looks, here you can adjust both individual characters and cells, you can change a lot of settings, from color, alignment, markers to more complex options, such as conditional formatting – this is when cells are selected in one way or another depending on the content, and this is done automatically based on the settings made. also, do not forget that, as I said earlier, Excel is not only working with numbers, but also with texts, including there are various formats of data types from plain text to date time, percentage style, monetary style, and so on, to one degree or another, the necessary information display option is always substituted. As I said earlier, their Excel can work with each of them, that is, for example, if you add one day to the current date, Excel will convert it to the next day.
In addition to the basic entities, Excel has additional functionality that helps to better present information — these are graphical elements, pivot tables, charts, graphs, pivot charts, and so on. In addition, Excel has macros – in fact, it is a programming language, with its help you can write any processing that will do everything you need. But their use is difficult since it is necessary to know the programming language and, as a rule, very rarely anyone uses them, we will touch on them, but at later stages of training.
