Microsoft Office XP for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide

Chapter 10. Introducing Excel 2002

With Excel 2002, the spreadsheet program of the Microsoft Office suite, you can track, calculate, and analyze numbers and create charts to depict this information visually.

After you type numbers into a grid of cells on an Excel sheet (Figure 10.1), you can enter formulas in adjacent cells that total, subtract, multiply, or divide the numbers. You can also enter functions (special Excel formulas) that perform dozens of complex calculations, from simple averaging to sophisticated financial calculations such as Net Present Value. Excel can even calculate highly involved statistics, such as the inverse of the one-tailed probability of the chi-squared distribution.

Figure 10.1. A Microsoft Excel worksheet.

Excel also ...