1.1. INTRODUCTION TO MS EXCEL


What is the Spreadsheet or Excel

Excel is all about numbers! There’s almost no limit to what you can do with numbers in Excel, including sorting, advanced calculations, and graphing. In addition, Excels formatting options mean that whatever you do with your numbers, the result will always look professional!

Data files created with Excel are called workbooks (in the same way as Word files are called documents). But where Word starts up with a single blank page, Excel files by default contain three blank worksheets. This gives you the flexibility to store related data in different locations within the same file. More worksheets can be added, and others deleted, as required.

You’ll often hear Excel files referred to as spreadsheets. This is a generic term, which sometimes means a workbook (file) and sometimes means a worksheet (a page within the file).

Why do I need a Spreadsheet?

There are many reasons why you might need a spreadsheet. Here are few different scenarios:

Scenario 1 - Personal Investments

You have bought shares in a few different companies and want to keep track of how well, or badly, they are doing. You could enter these values in a spreadsheet:

My Share: Share1

Price Paid: 0.25

Number Held: 1000

Total Cost: £250

Value Now: 0.35

Worth Now: £350

Profit/Loss: +£100

The spreadsheet would do all the sums for you. All you must do is enter the correct formulas. In the spreadsheet above, if we changed the number in the "Value Now" box, the "Worth Now" box and the "Profit/Loss" box will automatically be updated. That way you could see briefly how well your shares are doing.

Scenario 2 - Personal Finances

We only have a limited amount of money coming into the house each month. The problem is that money seems to be disappearing fast. If would be nice if we could keep track of where it's all going. A spreadsheet could help us. We could enter the data like this:

Monthly Income: £1500

Gas: 25

Electricity: 20

Phone: 35

HP: 250

Food: 350

Mortgage: 425

Car: 130

Total: £1235

Leftover: £265

Of course, we could do all that on a piece of paper. But entering the data into a spreadsheet gives us better control. We could change one value, that massive food bill, and see how much we had left over if we didn't spend so much money on food. Once the formulas are entered, the other figures would be updated automatically.

So, there we have two simple scenarios where a spreadsheet might come in handy. Of course, they can be used, and often are, in a business situation. If you want to keep track of things like stock and profit margins, then spreadsheets are very useful indeed. In fact, spreadsheets are useful in a wide range of situations, both business and non-business.

 

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