How To Use Excel:
A Beginner’s Guide To Getting Started

Excel is a powerful application—but it can also be very intimidating.

That’s why we’ve put together this beginner’s guide to getting started with Excel.

It will take you from the very beginning (opening a spreadsheet), through entering and working with data, and finish with saving and sharing.

It’s everything you need to know to get started with Excel.

Opening a spreadsheet

When you first open Excel (by double-clicking the icon or selecting it from the Start menu), the application will ask what you want to do

If you want to open a new spreadsheet, click Blank workbook.

To open an existing spreadsheet (like the example workbook you just downloaded), click Open Other Workbooks in the lower-left corner, then click Browse on the left side of the resulting window.

Then use the file explorer to find the workbook you’re looking for, select it, and click Open.

Working with the Ribbon

The Ribbon is the central control panel of Excel. You can do just about everything you need to directly from the Ribbon.

Where is this powerful tool? At the top of the window:

There are a number of tabs, including Home, Insert, Data, Review, and a few others. Each tab contains different buttons.

There’s also a very useful search bar in the Ribbon. It says Tell me what you want to do. Just type in what you’re looking for, and Excel will help you find it.

Most of the time, you’ll be in the Home tab of the Ribbon. But Formulas and Dataare also very useful (we’ll be talking about formulas shortly).

Managing your sheets

As we saw, workbooks can contain multiple sheets.

You can manage those sheets with the sheet tabs near the bottom of the screen. Click a tab to open that particular worksheet.

If you’re using our example workbook, you’ll see two sheets, called Welcome and Thank You:

To add a new worksheet, click the + (plus) button at the end of the list of sheets.

You can also reorder the sheets in your workbook by dragging them to a new location.

And if you right-click a worksheet tab, you’ll get a number of options:

Entering data

Now it’s time to enter some data!

And while entering data is one of the most central and important things you can do in Excel, it’s almost effortless.

Just click into a blank cell and start typing.

You can also copy (Ctrl + C), cut (Ctrl + X), and paste (Ctrl + V) any data you’d like

Try copying and pasting the data from the example spreadsheet into another column.

You can also copy data from other programs into Excel.

Try copying this list of numbers and pasting it into your sheet:

• 17
• 24
• 9
• 00
• 3
• 12

Basic calculations

Now that we’ve seen how to get some basic data into our spreadsheet, we’re going to do some things with it.

Running basic calculations in Excel is easy. First, we’ll look at how to add two numbers.

Let’s add 3 and 4. Type the following formula in a blank cell:

=3+4

Then hit Enter.

When you hit Enter, Excel evaluates your equation and displays the result, 7.

But if you look above at the formula bar, you’ll still see the original formula.

That’s a useful thing to keep in mind, in case you forget what you typed originally.

Now let’s try something different. Open up the first sheet in the example workbook, click into cell C1, and type the following:

=A1+B1

Hit Enter.

You should get 82, the sum of the numbers in cells A1 and B1.

Now, change one of the numbers in A1 or B1 and watch what happens:

Because you’re adding A1 and B1, Excel automatically updates the total when you change the values in one of those cells.

Try doing different types of arithmetic on the other numbers in columns A and B using this method.

Welcome to Excel

Excel can be intimidating, but once you get the basics down, it’s easier to learn the more advanced functions.

and there are many tips you can see in this blog about microsoft office, so... stay tune

THANK YOU!!😋😄