Excel 2016 Introduction

Lesson – Exploring Excel

Excel 2016

W ORKING WITH E XCEL  D ISCUSSION Microsoft Excel 2016 is a software application that can be used as a spreadsheet, database, or graphing program. The electronic spreadsheet portion of Excel allows you to perform sophisticated calculations and create formulas that automatically calculate answers. The advantage of using formulas is that, when data in the worksheet changes, all the formulas recalculate automatically. This feature assists you in developing budgets, forecasting models, creating sales plans, making financial projections, calculating inventories, generating banking statements, and basically working with any format involving numbers. In addition, Excel includes several autocalculation features that provide you with instant answers, using functions such as Sum , Count , and Average .

Excel’s data management capability allows you to manipulate lists of information such as names, addresses, inventory items, prices, and other data. Excel can sort lists and select specific pieces of information based on specified conditions and data filters.

You can use information created in an Excel spreadsheet or database to create an Excel chart. Chart types include column, bar, line, pie, area, doughnut, radar, surface, and several more. All charts are formatted using styles provided by Excel.

You can get help on an Excel task or feature in several ways. The Tell Me search box is where you can type words and phrases to help you find actions you want to perform or information about an activity. The Help icon, a question mark in the title bar of each dialog box, displays context-sensitive help. Many of the ScreenTips that are displayed when you hover over a button in the Ribbon display a prompt indicating that context-sensitive help is available by pressing the F1 key. In addition, you can use Microsoft Office Help to search both on-line and off-line sources to provide assistance and training, and answer your questions about Office products. Other help features include smart tags. Smart tags appear when you perform certain actions and provide a menu of choices for dealing with those tasks. For instance, the Paste Options button allows you to decide how formatting differences should be applied when moving or copying data to another cell.

In addition, Excel shares features, such as the Smart Lookup command, with other Office applications. You can use the resulting Insights pane to look up a wide variety of information such as the exchange rate for other currencies or to check a publicly-held company’s current stock price.

Page 2

OFFICEPRO, Inc.