Let's begin by taking a look at your Excel environment and some of the things you can
do to set up your Excel environment to make working in Excel easier for you.
Down at the bottom of the Excel window you have the Sheet tabs, which are each separate
worksheets. They remind me of pages in a book.
All the Sheets together make up the workbook, or spreadsheet.
To the right, is the Zoom tool. You can zoom in and out by left-clicking the
slider and dragging it back and forth. You can also use the scroll bar above it to
scroll left and right in the worksheet. In this same area, you also have access to
the page view tabs. By default, the Normal View is selected, but
you can change to Page Layout or Page Break View by left-clicking either option.
Let's just leave it as the default. At the top of the page, you have the Ribbon,
which is the new menu system that is arranged in tabs.
On each tab you'll find commands organized in groups.
Above the Ribbon, you'll see the Quick Access toolbar.
One of the simplest things you can do to make accomplishing basic tasks faster is to customize
the Quick Access toolbar. The Quick Access toolbar resides right next
to the Microsoft Office Button in all the Office 2007 applications and allows you to
reach commonly used commands quickly. By default, the Save, Undo, and Redo commands
have already been added. To view the commands you can add, simply click
the down arrow next to the Quick Access toolbar and a menu will appear.
Let's see. Sort Ascending and Sort Descending are two
commands that are used often in Excel, depending on the type of spreadsheet you work with.
To add the Sort Ascending command, just left-click it to select it.
And now we can see that it appears on the toolbar.
As you can see, a check mark appeared beside Sort Ascending.
This means it is selected and appears on the toolbar.
To remove a command, just left-click any command with a check mark, and it will no longer appear.
See how easy it is to add and remove commands? I'm actually going to add the Sort Ascending
and Sort Descending commands. I think I may need to use them when I start
working with some of my spreadsheets. You can add more commands than the ones that
appear on the drop-down list. Just select More Commands, and from the dialog
box that appears, select the command you wish to add, click the Add button, and then click
OK. This gives you the ability to really customize
Excel. While working with Excel, you may find that
there are times that you want to work on your worksheet without the Ribbon.
Microsoft gives you the ability to minimize and maximize the ribbon.
To minimize the ribbon, click the drop-down arrow next to the Quick Access toolbar.
Select Minimize Ribbon from the list. And the Ribbon disappears.
Click the arrow again. You can see that a check mark appears next
to Minimize the Ribbon, which indicates this feature is toggled on.
To Maximize the Ribbon, just select Minimize the Ribbon to toggle the feature off, and
the ribbon will appear. In addition to the Quick Access toolbar and
the Ribbon, the Microsoft Office Button appears at the top of your window.
When you left-click the button, you access a menu.
From this menu, you can create a new document, open existing documents, save documents in
a variety of ways, and print. You can also add security features, send the
document, publish, and close the document. You can also click the Excel Options button
to open a dialog box where you can make some changes to the default settings.
In the Popular section, Show MiniToolbar is selected.
This shows the information that appears when you hover over a command like this.
If you're new to Excel, this information is helpful.
If you're a poweruser, this may be more of an annoyance.
You can turn this feature off here if you'd like.
I'm actually going to leave this on. There are a lot of things you can change here.
For instance, if you want four worksheets to appear by default, you can change that
here. In the Formulas section, there are some more
complicated settings. As you learn more about Excel and become proficient
at using it, you may want to revisit these settings, but for now, we'll leave it as the
default. Well I'm pretty comfortable with
the setup of my workbook so now that I know where everything is, I think I'll
get started!