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By Jaspal Singh
Updated: October 18, 2019

Learn Excel: Basics of Microsoft Excel, Beginner Tutorials, Intro

Any jobs in today’s world will require some basic excel skills. Some of those skills are – entering and formatting data, highlighting data, creating charts and reports, keyboard shortcuts, tricks for productivity, Excel ribbons, etc.

Today I will be sharing some of most fundamental and core Excel skills that will help you learn Excel for certain areas of your job.

Also see – The Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs) Guide To Excel

Learning Excel

Excel has more than 100s of ribbons or menu commands and 1000s of features that make this application an extensive one.

Some of the people can easily get lost at the start. So the need to navigate and access useful features you have to understand few things.

After you start Excel, it appears like this.

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Five most important regions in the screen.

1. Quick Access Toolbar:
All the necessary tools can be placed here. In the start, you will only see three buttons (Save, Redo, Undo). For ease of access, you have added more feature to Quick Access Toolbar.

2. Ribbon:
This is a type of Menu that is extended in length and height. It is made in an easy to learn format and has all the major features of Excel. With more than 1000s of features ribbons are made with groups and from those some important ribbons are – Insert, Page Layout, Data, Formulas and Home.

3. Formula Bar:
Every calculation you do will appear here once you start making formulas you will find its relevance.

4. Spreadsheet Grid:
This grid contains all the chart, data, numbers and drawings. One Excel file has several sheets inside. The grid of spreadsheet will only show those rows & columns that are active. You can scroll right and left to see more rows and columns. By clicking on the sheet names you can access other sheets or you, can use a keyboard shortcut (CTRL+Page-UP or CTRL+Page-Down).

5. Status bar:
This bar will keep you informed about the happenings if any calculation is going on or a macro recording or maybe you are creating a pivot report, all of this can be seen at this status bar. It also shows sum, minimum, cell counts, maximum values or selected cells. By right click, you will be able to choose which summaries you want to display.

8 Great Tools to Make You an Excel Expert

The following infographic will explain how to apply absolute plus relative references, how to practice the ampersand plus combine cells, organize spreadsheets with cell coloring, how to manage the VLOOKUP function, and more.

Data entering and formatting, tables & numbers

Using an Excel means you are handling some data. Excel is excellent at handling and feeding data. With the structure of cells, the grid allows to manage thousands of data point easily. Options like cut, copy, paste, highlight, find, go to, styles, etc. make it easy to maintain data and all other processes.

Links to learn more on data handling and formatting

Typing & Formatting Data in Excel
Tips for formatting your workbooks
Introduction to Excel Tables
Use Tables to handle data better

Learn Excel formulas and other resources

Introduction to Formulas
Top 10 formulas for aspiring analysts & managers
15 important formulas for everyone
Excel formulas explained

Books for Learn Excel Formulas

The VLOOKUP Book – Definitive guide to Microsoft Excel lookup formulas
Learn Excel 2007 through Excel 2010 From MrExcel: Master Pivot Tables, Subtotals, Charts, VLOOKUP, IF, Data Analysis and Much More – 512 Excel Mysteries Solved

Conditional Formatting

What is conditional formatting
Introduction to Conditional Formatting
10 Tips on CF
Highlighting Duplicates
Conditional formatting in Excel 2016