Easy Excel Basics for Beginners - Get Started with Excel

1. Introduction to Microsoft Excel Basics: Hi and welcome to Microsoft Excel basics. In this course, I'm just gonna teach you the fundamentals of using Excel. And this is just gonna be a really gentle introduction. So if you're brand new to excel, or if you feel a little bit overwhelmed by all the functions and features of excel, don't worry about it. I'm gonna make this really simple. And by the end of this course, you'll be able to use this function bar. You'll be able to navigate around the cells, will be able to do a bunch of formatting here, and you'll actually be able to build your own spreadsheet. That looks just like this. And I'm gonna walk you through this. And this is just a spreadsheet for if you were going to remodel your kitchen and wanted to calculate your costs. So I'm gonna show you how to do all this formatting, and I'm gonna show you how we set this up with formula, so that when you take your quantity and your costs that multiplies, it gives you a total. And then how it adds all the way down the column to give you a grand total at the bottom so This is a simple but effective spreadsheet, and it will give you a lot of the skills you need to kind of get started into excel and start feeling a little better about it. In the next lectures, I'm going to show you a number of different techniques for using the Excel, and then, once you're feeling comfortable with, those will go ahead and will create this spreadsheet in the following section. 2. The Power and Possibilities of Excel Templates: Now in the next lecture, I'm going to give you a little overview of how to get set up and started in excel, but really quick. Before we do that, I just want to show you some of the possibilities of the power of Excel. And I'm here in a This is just a basic Excel page of Just just open up, Accel. I haven't done anything to it yet, but I want to show you this. If you go click on file and new, you can go create a blank workbook, which is what we were just on. And that's just starting from scratch, and I'm going to show you some things to do to start from scratch. But you can also save yourself a lot of time if you really just want to dive in and get started, and you can use any of these office dot com templates and there are a ton of these, and it just depends on what you want to use it for. But let's say you need to use Excel for your work. You can go to this business folder and it's gonna bring up dozens of pre formatted templates that you can click on download and use immediately. So let's say, for instance, that you are an administrative assistant and you need to create a telephone list right here . You have organizational telephone list, so you click on that and you click download, and it brings up a pre formatted Excel spreadsheet where you just go and you type in the fields. You could put their last name, their first name, spouse's name, address, home number, work number, cell number and email. And it takes care of all that for you and going back into this business folder, let me show you a couple of other ones. You can do an invoice, so if you're going to send this out to a business that I needed to pay you, you can do a packing slip. Sales receipts, purchase orders, inventory lists, payroll calculators and the list goes on and on and on their almost endless opportunities. So if you go into finance and accounting, you'll find things like ledgers, expense reports, loan calculators, vehicle service records, basically anything that you want to use to organize your business or anything that your employer needs from you. Many of those things you'll be able to find right here and get started right away. And then as you develop your skills with Excel, you can take any one of these templates and you can go in and you can customize it. So if you need to change any of these line items, you can change that, or you can add additional calculations in other columns. If you need more information and you can manipulate Thies to suit you better and you'll be well on your way to drastically increasing your productivity. So that's just a quick introduction to those templates because those could really save you a lot of time. But in the next lecture, we're going to dive right into the very basics. We're going to start with a blank spreadsheet, and I'm just going to show you really how to get started from scratch. 3. Saving Your Excel File Where You Can Find It: way are with their blank document, and the very first thing I'm going to show you is how to save this document. So the first thing I recommend is going to your desktop and creating a new folder, because you need to have somewhere to save these. If you prefer, you can go down to your file manager in the left hand corner and you can create a new folder there, for instance, in your document panel. But for the purposes of making it super simple for you, I'm just going to show you, if you right, click on the screen and you go to new and this might be a little different, depending on the computer or operating system you have. But you go to folder, and that creates a new folder. And then I'm just gonna call this Excel. Examples. Click Enter, and there's your folder right there, ready to save your work into. So now you can go back to your Excel spreadsheet, and you can say, Go to file and save as, and now it's gonna ask you where you want to save it. I'm going to navigate in this left column to my desktop and there's my full of her Excel example. So I'm going to click on that. It shows that that's empty and it automatically names that book one, but I don't want it to be called Book one. I wanted to be called Kitchen Re model costs, because that's what we're going to eventually create. And then I'm going to say that, and now this is you can see. Now it's titled Kitchen Remodel Costs. So whenever I click, save the little save icon up here. It's going to save this as kitchen remodel cost, and I don't have to worry about accidentally closing it without saving my work or anything like that. But before we get into creating an actual kitchen remodeling cost worksheet, I'm just going to show you some very basic functions and techniques that you can use that you'll be able to use in almost any spreadsheet that you decide to create 4. Entering Data Into Your Worksheet: first, let's talk about entering data into your work. It's pretty simple. Basically. You just click on a cell, it will highlight it. And when it's highlighted by that black box, you could just type in whatever you want to type in. So let's say here we're gonna type in cabinets and then we're finished typing. You can click enter or you can click on the little check mark here. Now a couple of cool little tricks. If you want to go to the next cell, you click the tab, but and it jumps right over there. And then now we're gonna put in some numbers. Let's say it was just put in the number 1000 and then, well, let's go to the next cell and we want to put in a number there. Let's put in 200 and then you can click. If you click Enter, it will drop you down to the next line, and any time you hit enter, it'll drop you down. One line, one quick little tip. If you want to copy this information a number of times, you congrats on the corner of the box. See how my little cursor turns to a plus, and you can drag it down like this, and it will automatically copy all of that information down like that. That's a simple way to enter data into cells. In the next section, we're going to look at how to select cells and move around through the page a little more easily. 5. Easy Ways to Select Cells in Your Worksheet: I think this lecture we're talking about how to select cells, so there are a couple of easy ways to do it. Obviously. First, if you click on a cell, it will select it. Another way to easily select a number of cells is to click in the middle of the cell, and you can either drag it to the right or you can drag it downward recon, drag it diagonally and highlight as many cells as you want. So I can. I like this entire area here, and then I'm working with that area now if you click, if you left click again anywhere on the page, it will get rid of what you've highlighted, so it will just put you in tow one cell again. You can also use the shift in arrow keys. So if I press shift and right arrow will highlight along the row, and if I continue to hold down the shift and pushed the down arrow, it will go down the road, and if I push the left arrow, it'll come back in. So that's another quick way to select whatever cells that you want to select. In the next lecture, I'll show you how to use a couple of simple formulas to do mathematical calculations, which is where you'll really start to see the power and the magic of cell make your life more efficient. 6. How to Use Simple Formulas to Add and Multiply: throw in this lecture, I'm gonna teach you how to do a couple of simple formulas that will help you to add or multiply a bunch of numbers. So let's go back up to where we've been working. So I'm gonna go ahead and clear all of this information, and I'm going to start with a simple list of numbers. So I'm just gonna go clear contents gonna start right back up in the corner here. And I'm just gonna type in some very simple numbers and then hit the enter key. And these were just random numbers. This could be dollar amounts or quantities, anything. Really? I'm just going to show you how to add these and multiply them. Really? Simply So if you want to ab this whole column, you can simply go to the auto some button here, click that, and it is going to plug in this formula, and it's going to highlight all of these cells up here. It's It's guessing at what we want to add. And it's guessing correctly in this case because we want to add all six of these. And if you like what it says, all you have to do is percenter. And as you can see, it's automatically done the math. It's added all of these numbers up and put the total into this box. Now, let's say we wanted to create that formula manually. What I could do first, I'm going to copy these cells over. And the way you do that is you click and drag and then right, click and say copy or you can say control, See for copy. So I'm just gonna go over here and I'm gonna say control V for paste. So that puts all that new data right in there. Now, when I go down to this column and I'm gonna put in a formula manually whenever you start a formula, you start with the equal sign and then, in this case, we're gonna do the some which is adding and you notice as I start to type, it's gonna give me a suggest a list of suggestions down here, and these were just different formulas. You don't need to worry about them right now, but these air just suggested formulas that you could use. And in this case again, I just want to use the some formula which is adding and then you start with a parentheses, and then you can click on the cells that you want to add. So if I just click on the first cell, notice how it says D one and what's that? What? That's referring to his call, Um d right here and Row one. So that cell is called the one Now. If I just wanted that one, then I could just hit the enter key, and that would be great. But I want all of these so I can actually click in the center of that and dragged down and notice how it put a semicolon there. And so now it says D one semicolon d six. So that's adding D one all the way through d six. They're all highlighted, and they're all included in the formula. Now. When I hit Enter, it completes the formula, and as you can see it automatically at the bracket at the end. And if I click on this cell again, you can see the formula is right up here equals some D one through D six, and then it comes out same 22. So that's how to do the some. Now let's say we wanted to multiply a couple of members. I'm gonna start one more column here. We'll just do it really simply here we want to do five times six. You just go to hear it. Click your equal sign and you just type in the cells that you want to multiply where you can even click on them F one and then the star and Asterix and then have to. And if I had enter, you'll see five times six is 30 and you can see our formula up in the formula bar here and the results of our formula right there. So those air to simple formulas. And in the next section I'm going to show you how we're going to use those formulas in a spreadsheet for our kitchen remodeling costs to calculate our costs really simply without having to do all the math every time, way. 7. Adding and Formatting a Heading: all right now is where things start to get interesting. So what we're going to do in this section is we're going to recreate this kitchen remodel cost worksheet. So the first thing you would do is go to file and new and double click on blank workbook. And that's going to create a blank spreadsheet for you that we can then re create our kitchen remodel costs worksheet. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to save this, as so we're gonna go file. I see it as and we go to the desktop. And then I created that folder called Excel Example. So I just click on the folder and I'll rename this kitchen remodel costs and click save. And now you can see it's changed to kitchen remodel costs up here and now whenever we click save that will just continue to save it into that folder as that file. And we won't have to worry about accidentally closing it after we're done and forgetting to say that. So the first thing we're going to do is create that heading, so you click in the middle of this cell and drag it across to highlight the top four cells , and then you go up to here and you click, merge and center, and that combines all of the cells we just have one big sell for are heading. And then if you double clicking there, it puts the cursor in there, and then you just type in kitchen remodel costs and double click it again. Excuse me, click out of the cell and then click back to the cell that will highlight the entire cell, and then it's already centered because it automatically did that. We're gonna change some things about this. We're gonna make it bold, and we're going to make it. Let's do it. 20 22 Point fought and you'll notice that it is too big to fit now. But what you can do is grab this and drag it, and that will give you some more space. So now it fits in there just fine, and they will go in and add the color to it, too. So this is your text color, and this is your background color can highlight that and then just go pick the color that you want, and there it is the last thing we'll do is expand these columns a little bit so that we have plenty of room to put in our different line items, and we'll get right to that in the next lecture. 8. Entering and Alphabetizing Words In Your Worksheet: this lecture we're going to put in our sub headings for each of our category lists. So first, we're gonna put materials here than quantity, costs and total. Obviously, these aren't formatted yet. The first thing we're gonna do is expand this row a little bit just by clicking on the line and dragging. And then we're going to highlight this this and drag across. We highlight all four of them, and then we can go ahead and format these. So first, I'm going to send her all of them. I'm gonna make them bold, and I'm gonna increase the font size a bit. And then I'm gonna add a nice, lighter color to those for a little bit of subtle contrast. If I click off that, you can see what we've got there. And now I can start putting in all of the details. So the first thing we have is cabinet handles, and we're gonna have toe make a little extra room over here so I can fit all of it in here , and then I'll go ahead and fill these out really quickly. Okay, so I filled out all of the units in the materials list. Now notice that we have. They're not in alphabetical order. One of the many awesome things about Excel is that I can highlight this entire list. Go appear and say sort and filter and sort A to Z. Now it's telling me that there's data in the next section, but we don't want to do that. So we just want to continue with the current selection and click sort, and you notice that it's now in perfect alphabetical order and we don't really have to do a lot more formatting on that. But I'll show you just a couple of options that you would have is You could center that and that will center everything. Or if you wanted to indented a little bit, you condense everything just to give it some space that I don't. So I'm gonna send that back. You can quickly and easily increase the text size by pushing that big A. Or you can decrease the Texas. I will go with 12 or you can always do the text size. Here, you can change the font. If you want. You can underline. Basically, everything that's inward are also here, but ours looks pretty good. So we're gonna move on, Teoh entering their quantity costs in total. And we'll get right to that in the next one. 9. Entering and Formatting Numbers In Your Worksheet: way we're gonna start entering our quantities in. So we just highlight the first cell type in the number hit, enter it, magically drops down to the next row, put in our quantity and hit enter, and I'll just go ahead and do these super quick. Okay, so they're all my quantities. And now we're going to go into your costs. You just type in the number it enter. I've been the number hit. Enter and I'll fill these out real quick. Okay, there we go. And now we're gonna format these cells a little bit. And for the quantity, we're just going to justify the list over to the other side just to make it a little bit easier to see. The only reason I'm leaving this column wide is because the word quantity is larger, so we don't want to cramp it. We can bring the cost in just a little bit that I'm going to highlight this entire row and I'm going to go up here to the number formatting and you have all kinds of options here. Currency numbers, dates, times. But we're just gonna do currency. And we could either click here or there's a shortcut right here, and we'll just click on that and that will turn it all into currency and notice how it just automatically drops the dollar, sign all over to the left and gives us two decimal points. Now you can easily add decimal points or take them away. So it just took one away there or I could go to three decimal points. But generally speaking with currency, you just due to desperate points. That's how we do that. Now, in the next lecture, we're gonna look at this total column, and I'm going to show you how to create two formulas. One is, ah, multiplication formula to multiply the quantity times the cost to give you a total. And then the next one is a some formula to add the entire total to give you a grand total for all of your remodeling expenses at the bottom. 10. Using Formulas to Multiply and Add Your Data: I think this lecture we're going to multiply the quantity times the costs to get our total . So to create that formula and any formula, you always start with the equal sign. Type that in, and then you can simply click on the cell that you want to multiply, go shift and the eight key, which is also the Asterix. And then click on the next number that you want to multiply by and then click enter. You can see that automatically does the math for us. And if I click on this cell again, it will show our formula up here. So this cell equals B three times C three. So we have B three here and C three here, and our total is put in that column now, rather than clicking onto every one of these cells and typing that in one at a time all the way down here, and you can imagine how tedious that would be if you had hundreds or thousands of line items, we can just click on this list here, highlight this and drag it all the way down and release it, and we've And then if I click on this again you can see it's copied that formula all the way down this line. So each of these is doing the math correctly, and we've got our totals. Now we're going to go down here and create our grand total. So just type total here and tap to get to the next cell and then in here. We're going to do this some formula. And again. You can start by typing the equal sign to create your formula, or you can just go to auto some and it's going to select all of the columns above it. And if we don't want all those columns like that blank column, we don't want include that so we can just go shift arrow key, and that will raise it up one. So now we have all of the items that we want to include in this formula, and the formula reads as this equal some, which means adding, and then in parentheses, D three, which is this cell right here, and the semicolon means through D 10. So Ad D three through de 10 and put the results here we had enter and there's our total and one thing you probably noticed as I've been going through the last couple of lectures is that when I put in my quantities and my costs, I put them in incorrectly. So as I look closely at this, I realized that I have Cabinet handles have 24 for $5 which is correct. I have Cabinet units for $200 and then I show 400 countertops for $6 apiece. So obviously that's wrong. I'm always supposed to have one countertop. I'm supposed to have 400 square feet of flooring so that my quantities and costs are off by one number because I've got this one at the bottom and it should go right here. So what I'm going to show you is how you can cut and insert cells without having to do a whole ton of reconfiguring. So I've highlighted these cells and I can either right click and go to cut or I can go control X. And then it could go up here and highlight where I want to insert them and then right click and go to insert cut cells. And what it did was inserted the ones that I cut from the bottom and it dropped all the other cells down one row accordingly, so you can see now it says one countertop, $500 400 square feet of flooring for $6 each, one fridge, one of them, four gallons of paint and one sink. So it's accurate now, but you'll notice when you look over here. If you take one sink times $150 it should not equal $500. So my formulas air still off because of the old numbers. So the easy way to fix that is to click on the top here, copy our formula down again, and it's basically just going to refresh the formulas. A Sodom all change. So now we have one fridge for $800.1 oven for $500.4 gallons of paint for $120. And that's a perfect example of the beauty of Excel. If I was doing this all manually, that one little air that I made would have taken a ton of work of copying and pasting and shifting things and redoing all the addition in the totals column here. But with Excel is they will just cut, insert, refresh the formulas and We're good to go now. In the next lecture, we're just going to finish things up and do some final formatting in our kitchen. Remodel costs were actually will be complete. 11. Final Formatting - Add Borders and Color: way. Okay, So in the last lecture, we added in our totals, and then we created a some function to give us a grand total of the bottom. Now we're just going to do some final formatting to our spreadsheet to kind of make it look a little sharper and more presentable. So the first thing I want to do is highlight the total row here at the bottom, and we're just gonna put a little bit of color and here in the background to make it stand out a little bit more like that, we're gonna put some grid lines in here to kind of differentiate our columns and make are heading. Stand out a little bit more and one note on grid lines. You'll see all these great grid lines here. These are just guidelines. These aren't going to show up. For instance, if you were to print this, these air just here within the spreadsheet to make it easier to see where your cells are. So if you want to have grid lines in here, that will stand out a lot and will also show up in printing when you actually need to highlights the cells and go appear to your formatting section here, click on the borders and go toe all borders. When I click off that, you'll see it's put a full border around each of the cells that I highlight it and then you'll notice, too. If I highlight everything and I click on the full borders, you'll notice that it puts a box around every single cell, which is a little much to be honest. So I'm gonna undo that. And I'm just gonna highlight each column and I'm gonna put a border around the edge just outside borders, so it just makes each column of data stand out. So that's just a little cleaner and easier to read. And we're just gonna copy that onto these other columns as well. So you'll see that that just defines each column a little bit more and makes it a little bit easier to read. And then I'm going to go highlight these as well and go all borders, and you can see that that just puts a nice box around those. So that's just some simple and clean formatting to kind of spruce up your spreadsheet a little bit and make it look a little nicer 12. Printing Your Work: okay. And this lecture we're gonna be talking about printing. And in the modern era, we do a lot less printing these days. Everything's kind of gone paperless lot of sharing on the cloud. But every once in a while, you still need to print something out to share it with someone or printer report. So I'm going to just give you the basics of printing, so you know how to do that. So let's say you have a little spreadsheet that you've created, and you need to go ahead and print. The basic way to print is to go to file and go down here to print, and it's gonna give you a bunch of options here. And it's also going to show you a really nice print preview here, which makes it really easy to see how it's gonna turn out. So, as you can see, this kind of has our spreadsheet just tucked up in the corner of this 8.5 by 11 sheet, and in the settings here, you can change a lot of the options to make it print however you want. The first option here is to print the active sheets, which is what we have here. We have one sheet active. You can print the entire workbook, which would be all of the work sheets in that workbook. So if I had three different worksheets with different spreadsheets on each one, it would print the entire thing. Or you can print a just a selected area. You could play with the margins to give more or less white space around your spreadsheet, and then you can scale it to fit the page in different ways. So in this example, where we have a horizontal orientation to our spreadsheet, one option would be to change this from portrait orientation to landscape orientation. You can see it already fits a little bit better, but then we can go into our scaling and we could go to customs scaling. And it allows us to adjust the size so we can either type in a number here or we can just click on the scrolling. So let's go to like, 100 and 70% of normal size and click OK, and now you'll see it's expanded it a lot better to fit into that space, and you'll also notice that it's still justified over to the left side, so we have extra space on the right here. So what we can do is adjust our margins as well by going to custom margins. And we could make the spacing larger, smaller on the sides. By adjusting the left and right margins. You could do the same with the bottom or the top, but what we're going to do is change the centering. So we're going to center this horizontally by clicking that button, and they were just gonna click. OK, and you'll see it brings it over nicely into the center. Then, when you have everything set up the way you want it to, you can go over to here and you can select your printer. Then, once you have the printer that you want, you can select the number of copies that you want and go and click on the print button. Now let's take a look at another example that has additional data, and we'll show you how to arrange that on the page so you can see in this example we have our spreadsheet, but we also have a pie chart over here. And if we go to our print preview by going to file and print or alternately, you can click control P for print. You can see now that in our portrait orientation, it's cutting off most of the chart. So to prevent this from getting cut off, we have a couple of options. One option is to change this to landscape orientation, and you can see that's better. But it's still cutting off some of the wording over to the right, so we could then either goto our margins, and right now we're set it normal margins. But we could change it to narrow margins, which just basically makes the spacing around our information smaller. So we'll try that, and you can see that brings it in a little bit. But it's still coming off the edge just a bit. So now we can go to scaling, weaken, go to fit sheet on one page, and when we do that, you'll see it shrunk it down to fit. So now we have everything on there, or we could even customize it so you can see it shrunk to 92%. But we could try and get it even closer and go say, 95% of normal size and click. OK, you see, that still fits now. Of course, we can also center it if we, like, go to customs, scaling options, good margins and center horizontally. Okay, and that looks a little better. But we still have quite a bit of white space from the actual shape of the pie chart here. And so we can go in and we can adjust the margins when we could just take the great margin out and we can increase the left margin, Click OK, and that's going to shift it over some more. They will even do that a little bit more and now we're looking more centered now. Another option if we wanted these two items printed on different pages, is that we can reset our margins to normal and we'll un center our data and we'll go to no scaling. So we're basically putting everything back. And now listen. We can essentially change the scaling T to make this piece large enough to fit on one page , and then this piece would automatically flow over to another page and you can do that by going here doing custom scaling. But there's an easier way to buy going back here to our main screen. And if you go to the view tab up on top were normal view. Right now you can go to page break view. You can grab any of the edges of your print area and drag them and change them. So you see, this is showing page one, and this is showing page two in effect. Grab. It's a little hard to see underneath the chart here, but if I grab this bar and drag it over here, I'll move this chart season. See what it says. See, we have Page One on the left and we have Page two on the right. I'll just drop that go undo So it goes back to where it belongs. So now we have our spread sheet on page one and our chart on page two and make sure you click off of the chart. Otherwise, it'll only print the chart, so we'll go take a look at that in the print preview. So now it shows our table on page one and our chart on page two. And of course we want these to fit better. We can just go to our scaling custom scaling and increase the size of our image. Click. OK, take a look at both of them. Make sure they fit all right, and then we can go in and go to margins and say center horizontally. We could even say center vertically if we wanted to show right in the middle of the page. And there you go. So those are some basics on adjusting your page layout and getting your spreadsheets printed. 13. Excel Basics Conclusion: congratulations. You've officially made your own spreadsheet from scratch. Now you can either create your own spreadsheets and start experimenting with different formulas to create different mathematical calculations. Or you can even go into some of these pre formatted templates under the File New section, and you can open up any of these. And if we open up this organizational telephone list, you could now go in here and use the skills that you know. And, for instance, if you want to put their middle name could right click on that, say, insert, And you can add a new column and type middle, and you can customize the spreadsheet to suit your own purposes. I hope youll go right out and create a spreadsheet for something that's practical for you, whether it's a budget or a phone list or a grocery list with estimated costs. Anything that can get you practicing some excel, and I hope you will share your struggles and your successes in the discussions. If you come across an awesome keystroke or function or formula that you just love, please definitely shared in the discussions for the benefit of other students. And if you have any problems or questions, also ask questions, and I'm glad to help you. And best of luck on Your Excel journey