Office 2007 Bible

Creating Your First Excel Worksheet

This section presents an introductory hands-on session with Excel. If you haven’t used Excel, you may want to follow along on your computer to get a feel for how this software works.

In this example, you create a simple monthly sales projection table along with a chart.

Getting started on your worksheet

Start Excel and make sure that you have an empty workbook displayed. To create a new, blank workbook, press Ctrl+N.

The sales projection will consist of two columns of information. Column A will contain the month names, and column B will store the projected sales numbers. You start by entering some descriptive titles into the worksheet. Here’s how to begin:

1. Move the cell pointer to cell A1 by using the direction keys. The Name box displays the cell’s address.

2. Enter Month into cell A1. Just type the text and then press Enter. Depending on your setup, Excel either moves the cell pointer to a different cell, or the pointer remains in cell A1. (You can change this behavior in the Advanced category of the Excel Options dialog box. Appendix A, “Customizing Office,” explains how to find and work with options.)

3. Move the cell pointer to B1, type Projected Sales, and press Enter.

Filling in the month names

In this step, you enter the month names in column A.

1.	Move the cell pointer to A2 and type Jan (an abbreviation for January). At this point, you can enter the other month name abbreviations manually, but we’ll let Excel do some of the work by taking ...