A deep dive into Excel 2010's ribbon menu

Introduced in Microsoft's Office 2010, the ribbon was designed to provide a quicker and easier interface for the buttons. I will talk about a few of the home buttons on the ribbon. Under this tab you can perform some of the more commonly used functions such as format the text, formulas, pasting data and formatting tables.

 The first items, starting from the far left, is the clipboard section. From here you can cut, copy, and paste information. If you would like to invert your content and paste it into the cells, then you can select "Format Paste".

 Under the Font section you can change font style, size, superset or subset, bold, italicize, underline, draw borders around cells, fill cells a different color and change the color of your font. The for mentioned items are listed in order from top left to bottom right.

Next up is the Alignment section. The first set of buttons allows you to change the alignment to top, middle or bottom. The next button allows you to change the angle the text shows up so if you would like to have text going up and down instead of left to right. If text is too long for a cell and you don't want to elongate the cell, then you can wrap the text and it will write the text below it or wrap it to the new line.  The next buttons allow you to change the justification to your text such as left, centered or right justified. Finally, you can change the indentation for the text to left or right and increase it by 5 spaces at a time.

Under the Number menu we can change how the cell shows our data. We can set the numbers as such things as "Percentage" or "Fraction". You can change the dollar amounts to Euros or other currency. Finally, you can increase or decrease the number of decimals the numbers show.

The Styles section allows you to change a cell or cells so that they can have a colored scheme to them. They make the cells easier to read and allow you to be more organized with your data. You can also format the data as a table and choose your layout. 

The Cells section allows you to insert cells, delete cells or format them. You can select such items as listed in the picture below. 

The last item on the ribbon is Editing. From here you can use formulas to be inserted into a cell, Fill a cell or Clear it. You can also apply a filter to sort your columns. Find & Select allows you to search for data you may be looking for. You can also press the hotkey of Control+F. 

I hope you enjoyed this guide on the ribbon menu!

A beginners guide to Excel 2010

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.