Page 18 - Excel Workbook for Dummies

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Introduction

xcel is the most sophisticated spreadsheet program available in the world of personal
Ecomputing. As such, this program is much more than just an electronic version of an
accountant’s familiar green sheet for crunching numbers. For millions of users the world
over, Excel is also their number one forms designer, their interface to the corporate data-
base, as well as their premier charting program.

Given Excel’s indisputable versatility, it should come as no surprise that mastering the basics
of the program, not to mention its finer points, is no small undertaking. My experience, how-
ever, in teaching adults to use all manner of Excel’s capabilities has convinced me that this
mastery is greatly accelerated with just a modicum of hands-on experience judiciously
applied to rather simple but realistic data-related problems.

About This Book

As its name suggests, Excel Workbook For Dummies is designed to give you the kind of hands-
on experience with all the major aspects of the program you need to start using the program
for business or home with a certain degree of confidence and efficiency. As you’d expect from
this type of book, the workbook is primarily composed of questions and exercises that give
you plenty of opportunities to experience the purpose and benefits of Excel’s many features.
It’s my hope that as a result of doing the exercises in this workbook, you’ll not only be in firm
command of the basic skills necessary to work with confidence in the Excel spreadsheet but
also have a good idea of the overall power of the program through experience with its fea-
tures beyond the spreadsheet.

Conventions Used in This Book

By convention, all the text entries that you type yourself appear in bold. In addition, all file-
names appear in italicized type even though they are not italicized when you see their names
in Windows Explorer or the Excel Open dialog box.

When it comes to instructions in the exercises throughout the workbook, you’ll notice two
conventions:

Menu commands are introduced by the word “choose” followed by the menu sequence
separated by the ➪ symbol, as in “Choose File➪Save As.”
Selections in dialog boxes are most often introduced by the word “select” followed by
the name of the option name or button, as in “Select the Alignment tab” or “Select the
OK button.”

In both cases, you must decide on your own whether to select the menu command or dialog
box option or button with the mouse or with the keyboard. In the case of menu commands,
you can choose among clicking the menu and menu items with the mouse, activating the menu
by pressing F10 and selecting the menu and menu items with the cursor keys, or pressing the