Beginning Microsoft Excel® Tutorial

A spreadsheet is a rectangular table or grid of information, according to Wikipedia. The Excel® spreadsheet software has the ability to both calculate numbers and depict graphs.

Each spreadsheet consists of small, rectangular boxes, called cells, organized in an orderly fashion into columns (vertically) and rows (horizontally) on a worksheet, the overall grid. Several worksheets can be contained in a single workbook. 

In the Excel® 2003 and Excel® 2007 spreadsheet software for the PC, as well as the Excel® 2004 spreadsheet software for the Mac, a workbook contains three worksheets by default. However, the Excel® 2008 spreadsheet software for the Mac only contains one worksheet by default. You can always add more worksheets if you need them, as we’ll learn later.

There’s not much chance you’ll run out of space using this program. Each worksheet in the Excel® 2003 and Excel® 2004 spreadsheet software contain 65,536 rows and 256 columns, with a total of 16,777,216 million cells altogether. The newer Excel® 2007 and 2008 spreadsheet software exceed even those limits. They both have 16,384 columns and more than one million rows. Tell me how many cells there is altogether in each of those?  

On each worksheet the columns are identified by letters of the alphabet and the rows by number. The location of each cell is defined by a single letter and address combination, called a cell address. A cell’s address could be A10 or G25, for instance. Open up your version of the Excel® spreadsheet software, and try to find those two cells on the worksheet in front of you.

Note for 2004: The program will first open to the Project Gallery window. You’ll see the Excel® Workbook choice is selected. That’s the choice you want. Either click on Open or hit the Return key, and your workbook should open.

By the way there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. Therefore you can see that, to the right of column Z, the column names start with AA, AB, etc.