The Work Surface

Quick reference

• 00:04 In the last video, we looked at the ribbon,
• 00:07 which is the big user interface that allows us to get access to our commands.
• 00:11 In this one, what I'd like to focus on is the part where we actually get work done,
• 00:15 which is the worksheet grid you can see here.
• 00:17 You'll notice that the grid has column headers that go across the top, A, B,
• 00:22 C, D, E.
• 00:22 And it has row numbers down the left-hand side.
• 00:25 So, when we refer to cells in Excel, if I were to go and select this
• 00:29 cell right here, we always refer to the column first and then the row.
• 00:34 So this would be cell F4 and cell H7.
• 00:38 You can see that as we select them, it shades the columns and
• 00:41 the rows just slightly to help us identify where we are.
• 00:45 In addition to this, we can also see that the address for
• 00:49 the cell that we've selected or the top left-hand side of the selection if we've
• 00:54 selected multiple cells, actually shows in what we call the name box over here.
• 00:59 It uses the exact same syntax or format to actually refer to it,
• 01:04 so cell H7, in this particular case, or E3.
• 01:08 Now, I can use this box that returns these address coordinates to actually
• 01:13 go to any cell in the worksheet if I happen to know where I wanna go.
• 01:17 So let's say that I wanted to go to, for example, cell N5,
• 01:21 I could type that in and hit Enter.
• 01:24 And it would take me all the way over there.
• 01:26 Or if I wanted to go to cell, let's say, how about AA15.
• 01:32 It would take me all the way over into that particular area as well.
• 01:37 Again, pressing or going back to A1 will always be the top left cell of
• 01:41 any worksheet, so it would take me right back into the home area.
• 01:45 In addition to this, if you have named objects in your worksheets, and
• 01:48 we'll talk more about tables later, but this is a table here, and
• 01:52 a table actually has a name.
• 01:53 So if I were to click somewhere else and then go back to this name box and
• 01:57 click here, it'll tell me, hey, would you like to select Table1,
• 02:01 which will allow me to grab that section of cells.
• 02:03 So, that's kind of a nice little feature here.
• 02:06 Now there's lots of other named objects,
• 02:08 we'll get to those later on as we go through the different courses.
• 02:12 Down the bottom, we have Worksheet tabs.
• 02:14 You can see we have Sheet One and a little plus icon.
• 02:17 I could create a new worksheet, this will give me Sheet Two.
• 02:19 So I can now move back and
• 02:21 forth by clicking on them to get to the different work sheets.
• 02:24 So, we have lots of worksheets in a workbook, okay?
• 02:26 So this will allow you to select different ones.
• 02:30 Up above the worksheet grid and immediately below the ribbon beside
• 02:34 the name box over here, we have what we call the Formula bar.
• 02:38 And what the Formula bar does is,
• 02:40 it allows us to actually see the true contents of a cell.
• 02:43 So if I were to go and say, click on this particular cell,
• 02:46 it will show me that what is truly there is 56.
• 02:49 If I go and select on cell B11, though,
• 02:51 even though it shows 278 in the worksheet grid, it'll show me in
• 02:55 here that I actually have a real formula, okay, so something different here.
• 03:00 We can use the Formula bar when we click on a cell to actually go back and
• 03:03 make edits as well.
• 03:04 So I could change this quantity to 57 and hit Enter, and
• 03:08 it will now show up in the worksheet grid with a new value.
• 03:12 Now if we mouse over the right or the bottom,
• 03:15 we'll also have scroll bars pop into view, and we can left-click and
• 03:18 drag those to move around our worksheet to both up and down or horizontally as well.
• 03:25 One word of advice on this, I do find that if you go into your System Preferences,
• 03:30 if you set your scroll bars to Always Show, they don't seem to work very well.
• 03:34 You get a little shadow of them.
• 03:35 That's always there.
• 03:36 But they only come into view when you scroll off the screen,
• 03:39 which is kinda difficult to trigger unless you're already scrolling using a mouse
• 03:42 wheel or something like that.
• 03:44 So I would prefer to leave them at this point in time so
• 03:47 they only pop up when they're actually needed.
• 03:50 Now, we also have down in the bottom right-hand corner here,
• 03:54 this is the zoom slider.
• 03:55 So we can use the little buttons to increase or decrease the zoom,
• 03:59 zoom in or out.
• 04:00 We can also drag the little slider to move into different areas as well to change
• 04:05 the magnification.
• 04:07 The last area that I wanna show you is the Quick Information section or
• 04:10 Quick Information area, rather.
• 04:13 This gives us a little bit of quick info about the cells that we've selected.
• 04:16 You can see I've got an average and a count and a sum here for
• 04:19 the cells that I'd actually selected in the worksheet.
• 04:21 And I'm, of course, just doing those by left-clicking on the first cell and
• 04:24 dragging down.
• 04:25 If I were to grab text, it's gonna tell me that it's gonna count them cuz it
• 04:29 obviously can't do math on our text.
• 04:31 But when we actually go and grab any numeric fields, it'll try and
• 04:34 give me a quick little bit of stats about it so that maybe if I just need
• 04:37 to sum something up quickly, I don't have to go and write a formula to do that.
• 04:41 So that's the Excel worksheet grid and the rest of the user interface that
• 04:45 we'll be using as we go through and work through the next few videos.

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