Basic Terms in Microsoft Excel

Knowing how to use Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software is an essential skill for today's office workplace. Most jobs require at the very minimum the ability to navigate through the various sheets of a spreadsheet. The Excel application has been the most widely used spreadsheet program since the early 1990s.

In this free video software tutorial you'll learn how to use the various features of Microsoft Excel. Expert Gary Zier explains the basic terms you need to know, and shows you step-by-step how to use formulas, change text & row sizes, how to format cells, numbers, time, and how to use various auto-fill features. You'll learn how to copy & paste information from one cell to another, how to add and delete rows and columns, and how to use the auto-fill features to help you get your work done faster.

"Hi, I'm Gary for Expert Village. Today I am going to show you how to use Microsoft Excel. Excel is a spread sheet program meaning we can keep running worksheets of data and it also handles text. It is not only numbers and financial information. First I just want to give you a general background on what the Excel program interface looks like. When we open up, we have what is called a workbook and this is basically an empty sheet with columns and rows. We can add a different amounts of sheets. In other words here, we have just two pieces of information. We have the words students and zero. The word zero in this box which is called the cell but if I go ahead and click the next sheet, we see that it is a blank sheet. So I am going to go back to the first sheets. These sheets are basically used for putting different types of information. Let's say we have a spread sheet on the first sheet or worksheet we want to keep our income and revenue. The second sheet we would like to keep our outgoing expenses. So each sheet can categorize and be a different section of our spread sheet. We can add those sheets by just clicking on the insert button on top and click worksheet and now we have four worksheets on the bottom. So that is basically our interface. That is a workbook with worksheets and each of these boxes here are called cells and each cell has a cell address based on the intersection of the column and the row. So the first cell over here on the top left would be a one, that would be the name of that cell and if we go down here, this cell would be called D9. That is very important because when we start putting formulas into the cells, we want to be able to tell the program where to look for the information. In other words if it is adding two numbers, we need to tell the program which two numbers based on the location of the cells that those numbers are in. We would need to know those cell addresses to put them into the formula."