Chapter 1

Tapping Into Formula and Function Fundamentals

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting the skinny on the Excel basics

Writing formulas

Working with functions in formulas

Excel is to computer programs what a Ferrari is to cars: sleek on the outside and a lot of power under the hood. Excel is also like a truck. It can handle all your data — lots of it. In fact, in Excel, a single worksheet has 17,179,869,184 places to hold data. Yes, that’s what I said — more than 17 billion data placeholders. And that’s on just one worksheet!

The number of available rows and columns may be fewer depending on how much memory your computer has.

Excel is used in all types of businesses. And you know how that’s possible? By being able to store and work with any kind of data. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in finance or sales, whether you run an online e-commerce store or organize wilderness trips, or whether you’re charting party RSVPs or tracking the scores of your favorite sports teams — Excel can handle all of it. Its number-crunching ability is just awesome! And so easy to use!

Just putting a bunch of information on worksheets doesn’t crunch the data or give you sums, results, or analyses. If you want to just store your data somewhere, you can use Excel or get a database program instead. In this book, I show you how to build formulas and how to use the dozens of built-in functions that Excel provides. That’s where the real power of Excel is — making sense of your data.

Don’t fret that this is a challenge and that you may make mistakes. I did when I was ramping up. Besides, Excel is very forgiving. Excel usually tells you when you made a mistake, and sometimes it even helps you correct it. How many programs do that? But first, the basics. This first chapter gives you the springboard you need to use the rest of the book. I wish books like this were around when I was introduced to computers. I had to stumble through a lot of this.

Working with Excel Fundamentals

Before you can write any formulas or crunch any numbers, you have to know where the data goes and how to find it again. I wouldn’t want your data to get lost! Knowing how worksheets store your data and present it is critical to your analysis efforts.

Understanding workbooks and worksheets

In Excel, a workbook is the same as a file. Excel opens and closes workbooks, just as a word processor program opens and closes documents. When you start up Excel, you are presented with a selection of templates to use, the first one being the standard blank workbook. Also there is a selection of recent files to select from. After you open a new or already created workbook, click the File tab to view basic functions such as opening, saving, printing, and closing your Excel files (not to mention a number of other nifty functions to boot!). Figure 1-1 shows the contents presented on the Info tab.

The default Excel file extension is .xlsx. However you may see files with the older .xls extension. These older files work fine in the latest version of Excel.

Start Excel and double-click the Blank Workbook icon to create a new blank workbook. When you have more than one workbook open, you pick the one you want to work on by clicking it on the Windows Taskbar.

A worksheet is where your data actually goes. A workbook contains at least one worksheet. If you didn't have at least one, where would you put the data? Figure 1-2 shows an open workbook that has two sheets, aptly named Sheet1 and Sheet2. To the right of these worksheet tabs is the New Sheet button (looks like a plus sign), used to add worksheets to the workbook.

At any given moment, one worksheet is always on top. In Figure 1-2, Sheet1 is on top. Another way of saying this is that Sheet1 is the active worksheet. There is always one and only one active worksheet. To make another worksheet active, just click its tab.

Worksheet, spreadsheet, and just plain old sheet are used interchangeably to mean the worksheet.

What’s really cool is that you can change the name of the worksheets. Names like Sheet1 and Sheet2 are just not exciting. How about Baseball Card Collection or Last Year’s Taxes? Well, actually, Last Year’s Taxes isn’t too exciting, either.

The point is, you can give your worksheets meaningful names. You have two ways to do this:

• Double-click the worksheet tab and then type a new name.
• Right-click the worksheet tab, select Rename from the menu, and then type a new name.

Figure 1-3 shows one worksheet name already changed and another about to be changed by right-clicking its tab.

You can try changing a worksheet name on your own. Do it the easy way:

1. Double-click a worksheet’s tab.

2. Type a new name and press Enter.

   The name cannot exceed 31 characters.

You can change the color of worksheet tabs. Right-click the tab and select Tab Color from the menu. Color coding tabs provides a great way to organize your work.

To insert a new worksheet into a workbook, click the New Sheet button, which is located after the last worksheet tab. Figure 1-4 shows how. To delete a worksheet, just right-click the worksheet’s tab and select Delete from the menu.

Don’t delete a worksheet unless you really mean to. You cannot get it back after it is gone. It does not go into the Windows Recycle Bin.

You can insert many new worksheets. The limit of how many is based on your computer’s memory, but you should have no problem inserting 200 or more. Of course, I hope you have a good reason for having so many, which brings me to the next point.

Worksheets enable you to organize your data. Use them wisely, and you will find it easy to manage your data. For example, say that you are the boss (I thought you’d like that!), and over the course of a year you track information about 30 employees. You may have 30 worksheets — one for each employee. Or you may have 12 worksheets — one for each month. Or you may just keep it all on one worksheet. How you use Excel is up to you, but Excel is ready to handle whatever you throw at it.

You can set how many worksheets a new workbook has as the default. To do this, click the File tab, click Options, and then click the General tab. Under the When Creating New Workbooks section, use the Include This Many Sheets spinner control to select a number.

Introducing the Formulas tab

Without further ado, I present the Formulas tab of the Ribbon. The Ribbon sits at the top of Excel. Items on the Ribbon appear as menu headers along the top of the Excel screen, but they actually work more like tabs. Click them, and no menus appear. Instead, the Ribbon presents the items that are related to the clicked Ribbon tab.

Figure 1-5 shows the top part of the screen, in which the Ribbon displays the items that appear when you click the Formulas tab. In the figure, the Formulas tab is set to show formula-based methods. At the left end of the tab, functions are categorized. One of the categories is opened to show how you can access a particular function.

These groups are along the bottom of the Formulas tab:

• Function Library: This includes the Function Wizard, the AutoSum feature, and the categorized functions.
• Defined Names: These features manage named areas, which are cells or ranges on worksheets to which you assign a meaningful name for easy reference.
• Formula Auditing: These features are for checking and correcting formulas. Also here is the Watch Window, which lets you keep an eye on the values in designated cells, but within one window. In Figure 1-6 you can see that a few cells have been assigned to the Watch Window. If any values change, you can see this in the Watch Window. Note how the watched cells are on sheets that are not the current active sheet. Neat! By the way, you can move the Watch Window around the screen by clicking the title area of the window and dragging it with the mouse.
• Calculation: This is where you manage calculation settings, such as whether calculation is automatic or manual.

Another great feature that goes hand in hand with the Ribbon is the Quick Access Toolbar. (So there is a toolbar after all!) In Figure 1-5, the Quick Access Toolbar sits just above the left side of the Ribbon. On it are icons that perform actions with a single click. The icons are ones you select by using the Quick Access Toolbar tab in the Excel Options dialog box. You can put the toolbar above or below the Ribbon by clicking the Customize Quick Access Toolbar drop-down arrow on the Quick Access Toolbar and choosing an option. In this area too are the other options for the Quick Access Toolbar.

Working with...