In order to do anything in Excel, you must first know how to move around. Let's examine some of the fundamental features of all Excel documents.
When you first open a brand new Excel document, you will see the expected Main Menu at the top of the screen. Most Windows applications give you a set of drop-down menu items letting you make choices, take actions, edit those actions. Fortunately, many of the actions you are already familiar with are found in Excel. Many of these features are found in the exact same place, have the same name, and perform identically to what you might expect from another program (ie. save, print, copy, etc.) You should plan to transfer much of what you already know from other applications like word processing into Excel.
The working part of the document contains a grid of small rectangles called cells. The layout of the cells is also rectangular in rows and columns. The columns of cells have a column heading using the letters A, B, C, ... and the rows are numbered 1, 2, 3, ...
One of the easiest ways to move around between the different cells is to use the keyboard arrow keys. The single cell that is highlighted with the 'picture frame' is something like the cursor in word processing. Anything you type will begin appearing in the highlighted cell. One way to control the location of the active cell is to press the arrow keys. As you might expect, the direction of the next highlighted cell corresponds to the choice of arrow key. (The up-arrow key moves the highlighted cell up one cell in the spreadsheet.)
Each cell of the spreadsheet is located on some row and some column. In this example, the highlighted cell is located in Column B and located on Row 3. Excel gives the user a visual clue of the active cell in the corner above the row numbers and slightly above the A-column. The combination of column and row is the cell address. A cell labeled J23 would be in column J on row 23. It is customary to label the cell address by naming the column first and then the row.
If
you are the curious type, you might want to depress your right-arrow
key and explore the column headings. If you hold the key down and
keep it down, the screen will jump and the column headings will quickly pass
Z. The folks at Excel decided that A-Z might not be enough columns and continued
labeling the columns after Z with AA, AB, AC, ...
Last Column |
You might wonder about the size of the spreadsheet. That is, how many rows and how many columns are available? As you can see from these two pictures, the number of columns is quite large as is the number of row! |
Last Row |
We don't think you need any help discovering still another way to move the highlighted cell. If you have accidentally clicked your mouse in a cell, you noticed that the clicked cell is now hightlighted. Depending on the location of the current hightlighted cell, it might be much quicker to point and click the mouse rather than hit the up-arrow three times and the right arrow four times.
We find moving around the window over the spreadsheet to be fairly easy with the arrow keys or clicking the mouse. sometimes you may want to jump a "long distance" from the current highlighted cell. There are ways other than using the arrow keys or the scroll bars on the sides of the Excel window. Check those out back at the Main Menu.