Excel® 2007 Bible

Chapter 3. Entering and Editing Worksheet Data

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• Understanding the types of data you can use

• Entering text and values into your worksheets

• Entering dates and times into your worksheets

• Modifying and editing information

• Using built-in number formats

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This chapter describes what you need to know about entering, using, and modifying data in your worksheets. As you see, Excel doesn’t treat all data equally. Therefore, you need to learn about the various types of data that you can use in an Excel worksheet.

Exploring the Types of Data You Can Use

An Excel workbook can hold any number of worksheets, and each worksheet is made up of more than 17 billion cells. A cell can hold any of three basic types of data:

• Numerical values

• Text

• Formulas

A worksheet can also hold charts, diagrams, pictures, buttons, and other objects. These objects aren’t contained in cells. Rather, they reside on the worksheet’s draw layer, which is an invisible layer on top of each worksheet.

Cross-Ref

Chapter 18 discusses some of the items you can place on the draw layer

About numerical values

Numerical values represent a quantity of some type: sales amounts, number of employees, atomic weights, test scores, and so on. Values also can be dates (such as Feb-26-2007) or times (such as 3:24 a.m.).

Cross-Ref

Excel can display values in many different formats. Later in this chapter, you see how different format options can affect the display of numerical values (see “Applying Number Formatting ...