Getting Started with Microsoft Excel- The Workspace

The Workspace

Figure 1 shows the Microsoft Excel 2000 window. Yours may not be exactly the same

because the user can customize the window. The main parts of the window are:

• Starting at the top we have the Title bar. When Excel is started a new workbook is opened with the name Book1.
• Below the title bar is the Menu bar. You can issue commands from the menu bar including such actions as saving the data to a file, printing a worksheet, changing the appearance of some text, etc. As with all Windows applications, menu commands may be executed by clicking an item or by typing the underscored letter while holding down the A key.
• Next come the Toolbars which provide a way of accessing some of the most used commands. The toolbars contain a subset of the complete set of menu commands. There are many toolbars but generally we have only two displayed: the Standard and the Formatting toolbars. By default, Excel 2000 displays the two docked together. We explain later how to separate them. You can specify which toolbars are visible with the menu command View|Toolbars. If you let the mouse pointer linger over a tool icon, Excel will display a tooltip. This makes it easy to learn the purpose of each tool.
• The Formula bar displays the current cell’s address in the Name box and either the value or the formula in that cell.
• The Worksheet window is the main working area. The space is ruled horizontally and vertically by gridlines, dividing the space into rows and columns. The smallest unit of space, where a row and a column intersect, is called a cell. At the top of the worksheet are the 256 column headings starting with A and ending with IV. To the left are the row headings numbered 1 to 65536 (or 16384 in versions prior to Excel 97). The letters (A, B, etc) at the top of the worksheet window are the column headers and the numbers to the left are the row headers.
• At the bottom of the worksheet window are the sheet tabs. A workbook is made up of worksheets and, optionally, chart sheets. Excel 2000 opens a new workbook with three empty worksheets.
• Finally at the bottom of the window is the Status bar. To the left is the message area. Most of the time this displays the word Ready. When you begin to enter something in a cell it displays Enter to remind you to complete the entry. At other times it may display Edit. To the right are some sculptured boxes called the Keyboard indicators. Press the c key a few times and watch the text “CAPS” appear and disappear.

2 Getting Started with Excel

Figure 1

The active cell is the cell with a border around it. To move to another cell and make it active, (a) use the keyboard arrow keys; (b) use the T key or the combination of S+T; or (c) simply click the mouse on the required cell. A quick way to return to cell A1 is the combination C+h.

Sources: Bernard V Liengme specially as a supplement to Quantitative Approaches in Business Studies by Clare Morris.