Skip to main content

Basics of Microsoft Excel



A. Microsoft Excel

Basics of Excel

 





There are 5 important areas in the screen.

1. Quick Access Toolbar: This is a place where all the important tools can be placed. When you start Excel for the very first time, it has only 3 icons (Save, Undo, Redo). But you can add any feature of Excel to to Quick Access Toolbar so that you can easily access it from anywhere (hence the name).


2. Ribbon: Ribbon is like an expanded menu. It depicts all the features of Excel in easy to understand form. Since Excel has 1000s of features, they are grouped in to several ribbons. The most important ribbons are – Home, Insert, Formulas, Page Layout & Data.


3. Formula Bar: This is where any calculations or formulas you write will appear. You will understand the relevance of it once you start building formulas.


4. Spreadsheet Grid: This is where all your numbers, data, charts & drawings will go. Each Excel file can contain several sheets. But the spreadsheet grid shows few rows & columns of active spreadsheet. To see more rows or columns you can use the scroll bars to the left or at bottom. If you want to access other sheets, just click on the sheet name (or use the shortcut CTRL+Page Up or CTRL+Page Down).

5. Status bar: This tells us what is going on with Excel at any time. You can tell if Excel is busy calculating a formula, creating a pivot report or recording a macro by just looking at the status bar. The status bar also shows quick summaries of selected cells (count, sum, average, minimum or maximum values). You can change this by right clicking on it and choosing which summaries to show.


Excel Options 




General:- The most commonly used settings, such as user interface settings, default font for new workbooks, number of sheets in a new workbook, customer name, and Start screen.

Formulas:- All options for controlling calculation, error-checking rules, and formula settings. Note that options for multithreaded calculations are currently considered obscure enough to be on the Advanced tab rather than on the Formulas tab.

Proofing:- Spell-check options and a link to the AutoCorrect dialog.

Save:- The default method for saving, AutoRecovery settings, legacy colours, and web server options.

Language:- Choose the editing language, ToolTip language, and Help language.

Advanced:- All options that Microsoft considers arcane, spread among 13 headings.

Customize Ribbon:- Icons to customize the ribbon.

Quick Access Toolbar:- Icons to customize the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT).

Add-Ins:- A list of available and installed add-ins. New add-ins can be installed from the button at the bottom of this category.

Trust Center:-  Links to the Microsoft Trust Center, with 12 additional categories.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Every BI Professional Needs to Learn Agentic AI in 2026

Meta Description:  Agentic AI is transforming business intelligence. Learn why BI professionals must embrace autonomous AI agents to stay relevant — with practical examples, skills to build, and a BI Lead's honest perspective on the shift. Tags:   Agentic AI  ·  Business Intelligence  ·  Power BI  ·  AI Agents  ·  Data Analytics  ·  Future of BI  ·  Career Growth Let me be blunt: if you're a BI professional in 2025 and you haven't started paying attention to agentic AI, you're already behind. I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm saying it because I've spent over a decade building dashboards, tuning SQL queries, and wrangling Power BI data models — and nothing in my career has shifted the landscape as fast as agentic AI. Not self-service analytics. Not cloud migration. Not even the first wave of AI/ML. This is different. And here's why. What Exactly Is Agentic AI? Forget the chatbot hype for a second. Agentic AI refer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quantum Computing

  Quantum computing is a new kind of computing that uses the laws of quantum physics to solve certain problems much faster than classical computers.  It doesn’t replace your laptop but can tackle very complex simulations, optimization, and cryptography‑style tasks that are intractable for ordinary machines.  *** ### What is quantum computing? Quantum computing is a computing paradigm that uses quantum‑mechanical phenomena—like superposition, entanglement, and interference—to represent and process information in new ways. Instead of classical bits (0 or 1), quantum computers use **qubits**, which can be in a mix of 0 and 1 at the same time, enabling parallel computation.  *** ### Classical bits vs. qubits - A **classical bit** is either 0 or 1; operations are deterministic and sequential.  - A **qubit** can be 0, 1, or any quantum “blend” of both, written as $$ \alpha|0\rangle + \beta|1\rangle $$, where $$ \alpha $$ and $$ \beta $$ are complex numbers capturing p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rethinking Agentic AI

 # Rethinking AI Agents: Why Intelligence Beats Integration Every Time ## More Tools Won't Save a Thoughtless Agent Every week, another development team ships an AI agent loaded with integrations — web search, vector databases, code runners, calendar hooks, payment gateways. The demo looks impressive. The stakeholders nod. Then the agent hits its first real user in a messy, unpredictable situation, and the cracks appear fast. The uncomfortable truth? Most AI agents fail not because they lack access to information, but because nobody taught them how to *think* about it. The industry has quietly developed a bad habit: treating agent-building like a hardware upgrade. Slow processor? Add RAM. Agent underperforming? Add tools. This logic sounds reasonable until you realize that intelligence doesn't accumulate through connection counts. A library card doesn't make someone well-read. --- ## Competence Isn't a Plugin Here's a useful mental test. Imagine hiring someone for a...
Post a Comment
Read more