The Microsoft Excel 2007 Starter's Guide

Introduction into Microsoft Excel 2007

Microsoft Excel and the Microsoft Office Suite of productivity applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access and Publisher) are used around the world to create dynamic, professional-looking documents for both business and personal use.  Excel is perfect for reports, spreadsheets, charts and graphs.

 Excel saves files using the .XLS and .XLSX file extensions which have become standards for and synonymous with the creation and sharing of documents.

This guide assumes that you have already installed Microsoft Excel or Office with the Excel application.  This starter guide is broken down into the following sections. If you want to jump to a section, simply click on the link:

Starting Microsoft Excel
The Excel 2007 Interface
Creating Formulas
Types of Operators and Precedence
Adding Borders and Shading Cells
Inserting a Chart

Start → All Programs → Microsoft Office (or there will be a Microsoft Excel icon in All Programs)

Interface

With the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, there is a new interface called the Ribbon. Some users prefer not to use it and instead use the old drop down menu system. Unfortunately you cannot simply switch over to the old interface. However, the Ribbon can be closed if you wish and there is a quick launch toolbar that can be customized to show your most often used items.

By double-clicking on the ribbon tab (Home, Insert, etc) or right clicking and choosing minimize the Ribbon to hide or show the full ribbon. You can also open the Ribbon simply by clicking the tab for the features you wish to see.

In the screenshot above you will notice two important features of Microsoft Excel 2007. The Quick Access Toolbar which can be shown either above or below the Ribbon and the Office Button which provides you with basic file manipulation options like save, open, print and send.

The new Ribbon layout has grouped features together in a fairly logical way that is meant to help you navigate them more quickly

• Home – General text, font and paragraph manipulation including formatting, alignment and bulleted lists.
• Insert – Features for adding non-text items to the document including Tables, Pictures, Clip Art, Drawing, Shapes, and more. Also for Hyperlinks, Headers/Footers and Special Characters and Symbols.
• Page Layout – The tab for how the page handles margins, indent, spacing, columns, breaks and page background and colors.
• Formulas – Everything you need for creating formulas all in one place including recently used operators, text, logical, financial, math, date, time and lookup or reference operators.
• Data – A group of icons for importing and manipulating data either from Access, the web or another document or source. Also sorting, filtering, consolidating and grouping.
• Review – The place to make your final changes including spelling, grammar, comments and the tracking of collaborative changes and notes.
• View – Where to go to change how you see the document while working on it in Microsoft Excel 2007. Zoom, Window management and document views as well as the display of rulers, grids, document maps and thumbnails.
• Add-Ins – The place to go to interact with and administer and Excel add-on programs and features.
• Acrobat – The Ribbon tab for creating, sending, reviewing and commenting on PDFs. Also the place to start an Adobe Acrobat Collaboration meeting.

Creating Formulas

The Formula Ribbon has collected together all the pieces for formula building.

1. Click whatever cell you wish to place a formula in.
2. Now you can either type the Equal sign (=) or choose something from the Ribbon.
3. If you know exactly what you want to type you may or else you can use the Ribbon to construct your formula.
4. Fill in the necessary fields and click Ok or type in your Formula.

Reference operators

Operator precedence

This is the exact order that Excel will use operators in a formula

Adding Borders and Shading to Cells

1. Select the cell you want to edit
2. Select the Home Ribbon and choose Format a Format Cells (Alternatively you can use CTRL-1.)
3. On the Format Cells Menu click the Border or Fill tab as desired.
4. Select how you want the cell to look and click OK.

Inserting a Chart

1. Choose the Insert Ribbon
2. Select the type of chart you want to insert from the Charts area of the Ribbon – Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, Scatter or Other.
3. Once you insert the chart you will be able to determine where you want it to be displayed and what data to put into it.

Tip  If you select only one cell, Excel automatically plots all cells containing data that directly surround that cell into a chart. If the cells that you want to plot in a chart are not in a continuous range, you can select nonadjacent cells or ranges as long as the selection forms a rectangle. You can also hide the rows or columns that you don't want to plot in the chart.

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