The Excel Essential Skills category groups together posts that cover the essential skills needed to confidently create Excel worksheets that are both professional in look and design.
Learn how to move, copy and paste information in Excel. Once you have mastered Cut, Copy and Paste you will find yourself shifting data around easily and reusing copied data, saving you the need to recreate the same information again.
All Windows applications have access to the Windows Clipboard. This is a special area used for moving and copying information.
The ‘Cut’ command moves a selection to the Clipboard while the ‘Copy’ command copies a selection to the Clipboard.
Learn how to add colour, borders and alignment settings to your Excel data to give your worksheet a more professional look and to make it easier for others to read. Read more
Formatting lets you change the appearance of data to control exactly how Excel will display the data on a worksheet.
An example of formatting is to add dollar signs, percentage signs and decimal places to Excel data. Read more
Learn how to preview your work before printing and how to print all or part of an Excel worksheet. Read more
Learn how to insert page breaks and scale an Excel worksheet for printing.
Once you have your worksheet created and formatted you may want to print it. Printing can be extremely challenging if you don’t know how to control where page breaks occur and how to fit your worksheet to print on a page so that you avoid having one row or one column printing on a following page.
The Page Setup commands allow you to set the appearance of the printed worksheet. Many Page Setup options apply to every page of the active worksheet. Read more
Learn how to insert, delete and hide rows or columns in Excel.
Once the basic worksheet is completed and tested, it may be expanded by inserting additional columns and rows. Additionally you can easily remove information from view simply by hiding it.
Being confident in how to save an Excel workbook, including save a copy and save as PDF, is a fundamental skill in Excel.
Once you have created a workbook (file), you will need to save the file in order to store it for later use. Saving a file means that you are storing the file into a storage area. Read more
The quickest way to total a range of cells in Excel is to use the SUM function.
The Sum function is one of the most commonly used functions in Excel. The function requires the first and last cells within a list, it then includes them and every cell between them into the total. For example =SUM(C4:C10) replaces the need to enter =C4+C5+C6+C7+C8+C9+C10.
Maybe you could just create a formula to add each of the cells when there only 7 of them…but imagine if there were 7000! Yikes! That’s when the SUM function becomes an amazing tool to have in your toolbox.
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Being able to create basic calculations in Excel is fundamental to being able to use Excel well.
Writing Excel formulas is much the same as writing an equation. With just a little bit of instruction you will be creating basic calculations in no time! And of course, you will be able to confidently read other people’s calculations which is awesome when you want to work out what the calculation is actually doing. Read more
Once you know how to enter data into an Excel worksheet you will be setting up tables of data in no time.
When you haven’t been shown how to enter data it can be a little tricky, so follow the steps below to learn the tips and hacks to entering your data easily into your worksheet. Read more
