How to Use Excel

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to use Excel. Let's begin by just opening up Excel. Want to go to our start button. And click on All Programs. We're going to find Microsoft Office. Click on that. And let's click on Excel to open it. This is the main Excel window. The part that we will be using most is this area down here that I'm highlighting. That we create, what you would call a Spreadsheet, in. Now Spreadsheet will have data across the top here. Like, I'll say, oh! We want to keep a list of our employees and the number of items that they sold this year. So what you would do, is you would create headings in this first row. Simply click in here. Let's just say, Employee Name. And we want to keep track of their sales for a particular year. Just say, Sales. And then, Year. Now under these headers, we have columns. In each column under the particular header. We're going to type in that employee's name. Under Sales, we type in the number of sales that they had. And for what year. Excel is very good in allowing you to maintain data like this. You can highlight your headers. And make them bold just by holding down the control key. And pressing B. That kind of, separates them out from the data, a little bit. It also allows you to put in charts and do summations. And things like that. I'm just going to give you a real simple example. Let's say, I want to calculate the total number of sales that I have between all my employees. I might be able to sum. To do that, we're going to insert, what's called a formula. Click down here, where we want our sum to appear. We're just going to type the equals. Which begins a formula. And type sum and a parenthesis. Then select out two values that we want to sum up. I'm just going to click and drag to highlight all of them. Close your parenthesis and say enter. As you can see, Excel has just generated for us a sum of all of our sales. My name is Dave Andrews. And I've just showed you how to use Excel."