Skip to Main Content
Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual
book

Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

by Matthew MacDonald
October 2005
Beginner content levelBeginner
400 pages
8h 53m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Chapter 1. Creating and Navigating Worksheets

The best way to avoid potential headaches is to take a quick tour of Excel as you start creating a spreadsheet. That's what you do in this chapter. Along the way, you learn how to enter information in the Excel window and how to open and save spreadsheet files.

Creating a Basic Worksheet

When you first launch Excel, it starts you off with a new, blank worksheet called Sheet1. A worksheet is the grid of cells where you type your information and formulas, and it takes up most of the window, as shown in Figure 1-1. This grid is the most important part of the Excel window. It's where you perform all your work, such as entering data, writing formulas, and reviewing the results. (A collection of one or more worksheets is called a workbook, which is also sometimes called a spreadsheet file).

Here are a few basics about Excel's grid:

  • The grid divides your worksheet into rows and columns. Excel identifies columns with letters (A, B, C …), and rows with numbers (1, 2, 3 …).

  • The smallest unit in your worksheet is the cell . Cells are the rectangular boxes that store your text or numbers. Excel identifies each cell using a shorthand name derived from the column and row it's sitting in. For example, C6 is the address of a cell in column C (the third column), and row 6 (the sixth row). Figure 1-2 shows this cell, which looks like a rectangular box. Incidentally, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Show Me Microsoft® Office Excel 2003

Show Me Microsoft® Office Excel 2003

Steve Johnson - Perspection, Inc.

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596101546Supplemental ContentErrata Page