There are many uses for Excel in today's digital world. You can do many things in Excel such as put together reports, charts, graphs and numbers for analysis.
During this tutorial I will be going over some of the basic functions of Excel.
Say, for example, you are doing your finances and you have entered in your numbers, but now you want a running total or sum of all your numbers for a given column. In the below image, I have selected the box under the column I want a total of. Next I have clicked and circled the "AutoSum" button.
After clicking the AutoSum button, it has updated this box for me. It now says "=SUM(B1:B3)". This means that the values entered in from the box ranges of B1 to B3, add them up and produce the sum; place the sum in the box I have highlighted. If you mess up and have the wrong boxes highlighted or you want more boxes highlighted, the selected area has little boxes at each corner. All you need to do is click+hold one of the boxes and drag. You can also just sum the box and enter the total. After you enter the total, you can click on the total box and change the range, manually.
You can then put all of this content within a table and have it highlighted. Under the "Home" tab on the ribbon, you can click "Format as Table" and select the layout you want.
Once you select the layout you want and click it, you will get a new dialog box that will prompt you for the range of your data. Also note that there is a check-box here that says "My table has headers". If you have this checked, it will not create headers for the columns for you. The default headers will say something like "column1", "column2" and so on.
If you think the range is wrong, you can once again grab the corners of the box, drag and it will update the range for you. In this example the box states that my range of data is from A1 to B4. A1 being the top left of my data and B4 being the bottom right of my data.
After you select your data range and hit okay, your table should look something similar to the below, but depending on your layout you may have different colors. You can also center all the text by click A1 and dragging the mouse to B4. On the "Home" bar you can click "Center" and it will center all the text in all the boxes you highlighted.
When you first add a table, it will have arrows for drop downs on the table's headers. This is for if the user wants to add a data filter. You can simply remove data filters by going to the ribbon under "Data" and click "Filter". This will un-highlight "Filter" and it will remove the data filter/arrows on the table's headers for you.
One additional item to make things easier to read in your table is if you have a scrolling list of data, you may want to "Freeze top row" so when a user scrolls downward on the data set, they can always keep the headers on the page. It makes things easier so that when they scroll down to find the data they want, they know the corresponding table header for the column without having to scroll back up.
Moving on we can also create a pie chart out of this data. Column A has my data's titles. For example, if you are doing your finances, you can have A1 = Car, A2 = insurance, A3 = Loans, A4 = bills. These will be the titles for the amounts that take up a piece of my pie chart. You will need to select the data range first before you go under the ribbon and select "Pie". If you do not select the data first, this will produce a blank pie chart. Under "Insert" on the ribbon, you can select "Pie" and select the chart you want.
Notice below when I select the chart, the data sheet highlights in purple on the left and blue on the right. This is excel separating the titles from the content. You can, too, in this mode re-select the data range and adjust.
If you do not want to make a pie chart, then the other options are a Line graph, Bar graph, Column graph and so on. These graphs can be created in the same manner shown above.
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