Selecting a Range of Cells in Microsoft Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Gary for Expert Village; let’s see how to select ranges of cells on our worksheet. We know how to select one cell that is just as easy as clicking as on that one individual cell. What happens if we want an entire range of cells, say certain cells in a row or in a column? Well it’s also very easy, all we do is click on the cell and hold down the left mouse key and then just drag the mouse over those cells and we see that our range of cells being selected in blue is growing, either vertically or horizontally, so that’s one way of selecting cells. Another way, sometimes when we create formulas like we did previously we want to also select a range of cells to be put into the formula. So the way to do that is to, we’ll create a very simple formula here. I’m going to show the common formulas. Here we have a, there’s an option for a lot of formulas in Excel so we have a very, a very easy way to categorize them and just show some common formulas that we frequently use. So here I change my view to most recently used and I have the sum formula. So I’m going to go ahead and click that and now I’m going to hit “ok” and it’s going to ask me what, which numbers, which cells would I like to put into that formula? So what I’m going to do instead of putting individual cells what I want to do is I want to put in a range of cells so here I am going to click on the end, the little box here that looks like the worksheet and I’m going to click on it and I’m, then I’m going to click on one cell that I would like to be the first cell and I’m going to actually drag and go down and all of the cells now are appearing in the formula. But they appear as the formula C2, which is the first cell over here that I chose, until C7 which is the last cell that I chose and that’s going to be my formula. It’s going to take the sum of C2 through C7 and I’m going to go ahead and click again, the formula, the little chart there at the end of the formula bar of the wizard and I’m going to hit “ok” and now my formula is set to take in the sum of C2, through, which is expressed though a colon, C7 and so now as I put, I didn’t have to put in individual cells, C2, C3, C4, C5, I can just go ahead and put that value here and as I put in numbers into anywhere into that range it will perform the calculation. "