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The Work Surface

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About this lesson

Recognize the main terms used to describe Excel’s work canvas. 

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the Excel workbook used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

The Work Surface.xlsx
9.3 KB

Quick reference

Topic

Application Terminology – The Work Surface.

When to use

Use to understand the main terms used to describe Excel’s work canvas.

Instructions

Reading the Grid

  • Excel’s grid is broken into columns (lettered across the top of the grid) and rows (numbered down the left side of the grid)
  • Cells are referred to by the coordinates, always citing the column first, then the row (i.e. A1, B10, D15)

The Name Box

  • Located above the upper left of the grid, but below the Ribbon
  • This box returns the address (coordinates) of the top left selected cell
  • Entering a cell address in this box and pressing Enter will take you there
  • If you have named objects in your workbook (like tables), selecting the name from this list will select the object

Worksheet Tabs

  • Located in the bottom left corner of the interface
  • Allows you to select different worksheets in the workbook

Formula Bar

  • Located above the grid, right of the Name box and below the Ribbon
  • Shows you the true contents of the top left selected cell (i.e. formulas instead of the value that shows in the grid itself)
  • Can be used to edit cell contents

Scroll Bars

  • Located on the right edge (vertical) and bottom right corner (horizontal)
  • These bars allow you to move the focus of the worksheet to other areas

Zoom Slider

  • Located in the bottom right corner of the application
  • Allows you to zoom in or out of the worksheet, making it appear larger or smaller

Quick Info Area

  • Located in the bottom right corner, to the left of the Zoom Slider
  • Takes effect when multiple cells are selected
  • Provides quick information like SUMs and AVERAGEs of selected values
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  • 00:03 In this video we are going to focus on the next
  • 00:06 important piece that we need to understand about Excel and that's understanding its work surface.
  • 00:12 Excel is a spreadsheet program. Which basically means that everything in the entire program is done in cells and we can see a
  • 00:20 picture of our cells right here, all these little drawings with the little squares on them, this is our collection of cells which is contained on the
  • 00:28 active worksheet that we're looking at. You'll notice across the top that we have some column headers ABCDEFG and so on and down the
  • 00:36 side our row headers of 1234567 and so on as well. Basically what those are is
  • 00:42 these are coordinate map-points that we can actually use to locate any cell. So if I were to say
  • 00:47 I want to find cell G3
  • 00:50 it would be right here. It's in column G
  • 00:53 row 3. I can actually see that through some different areas as well. You'll
  • 00:58 notice up here that when I've selected my cell it actually comes back with G3.
  • 01:03 G7, I8 this is giving me the name of the reference. But you can't always rely on that because unfortunately or fortunately sometimes
  • 01:11 we actually do different things in here. This is called the name box and allows us to actually define names as well for certain cells.
  • 01:19 In addition if I select multiple cells it just tells me what the starting cell is in the top left.
  • 01:25 If I look here, if I click this drop down list we actually have a table in here.
  • 01:29 This will allow me to quickly jump to it as well because these cells here are all
  • 01:33 named table 1. Even though it covers from A5 through to C9.
  • 01:39 So that's how we actually read the grid itself. You'll notice down the bottom that we have some tabs.
  • 01:44 Sheet 1, this is worksheet 2, there is nothing on this one and worksheet 3
  • 01:50 But we can actually quickly cycle through those tabs to see what our different worksheets have on them.
  • 01:56 We've already looked at the name box, up beside it here is the formula bar.
  • 02:01 And what the formula bar does is it actually gives us the contents of the cells. So if I click on cell A1
  • 02:06 it tells me that it says Sports Store Inventory. A2 says Ball Inventory.
  • 02:12 B6 says 84 and you might think well that's a little bit ridiculous because really, I mean I can see what's in the grid. Well not always.
  • 02:20 Here is what happens here is that if I click on this cell its got a formula in it that reads
  • 02:25 =SUMTable1[Quantity]) and what it's doing is it's actually summing up
  • 02:29 all of these cells for me but it puts the output in the worksheet grid. So what the formula bar
  • 02:34 allows us to do is to actually go back and look at, what are the contents of the cell really
  • 02:39 including here, not what are they showing me on the outside.
  • 02:44 We also have some other pieces that we can work with. We've got scroll bars down here,
  • 02:48 we can drag the scroll bar over to the right or we can use the
  • 02:52 arrowheads to move it further across the right because spreadsheets are massive.
  • 02:56 We can scroll all the way back to the left
  • 02:59 or we can scroll down as well and back up.
  • 03:03 You'll notice that there is over a million rows in an Excel spreadsheet now so you can have a lot of
  • 03:07 data that's in here so the scroll bars will help you quickly move around.
  • 03:12 We have a zoom slider if your spreadsheet gets really really big and you click the minus button you can actually zoom it in or out rather and
  • 03:18 take a look at what's going on on it. Or you can zoom it back in. If you need to
  • 03:23 you can grab the scroll bar and zoom it way quicker if you need to have bigger numbers.
  • 03:27 And this little point in the center is where our 100% is. You can't always get there with a single click
  • 03:32 but then you can use your +/- to actually drill into it to get it exactly where you need it as well.
  • 03:38 There is another little piece here, right now is blank it's actually going to show up right down here
  • 03:42 when I select some cells. This is called the quick info area
  • 03:46 and if you watch this now, I'm going to select 3 cells, drag it with a mouse and it
  • 03:50 comes back and tells me the average is 53.66. There are 3 cells that I've
  • 03:55 counted here or the count that it's given me. I've selected 3 cells and it summed up to 161
  • 04:00 and you'll notice that as I change this selection it will constantly
  • 04:04 do that for me telling me the sum is now 278 which happens to be the amount of my
  • 04:08 formula down here. It works as well on anything numeric.
  • 04:12 Text space it will only give me a count because of course it can't sum it or add it up and whatnot.
  • 04:18 It's a way to get some really really quick information about the contents of your cell.
  • 04:23 Something else that's important to realize is that in Excel we have context
  • 04:27 sensitive help. Now you've already seen the Ribbon in one of our previous videos but
  • 04:31 notice what happens when I click somewhere inside my table. There is a new tab that pops up. This is
  • 04:37 called the contextual tab. It will only show up when I'm inside an actual proper formatted table.
  • 04:42 When I click outside it goes away, when I click inside the tools that are available to tables popup. Okay so that's one way of seeing
  • 04:50 context sensitive help. The other way is if I right click on any cell
  • 04:55 it will give me a menu that is customized to the things that I can do with that cell.
  • 05:00 You'll notice there are some items that are grayed out. They're not available but if you notice
  • 05:03 this menu is actually going to look slightly different than the one that I
  • 05:07 click on when I right click in a cell beside it. It looks different. There's not as many
  • 05:11 commands and that has to do with the fact that some of the cells in here
  • 05:14 have things available to the tables where outside it doesn't.
  • 05:19 So context sensitive help all over the place. If you click on a cell and it pops up a context sensitive tab, like this, you know you've got
  • 05:27 context sensitive help. If you right click on any cell you get a list of shortcuts and commands that are available for that selection of data.
  • 05:35 So that's how we go about reading the Excel work surface from how to read cells to what can we actually do with them.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

The Ribbon
6m:23s
Navigation
5m:31s
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