Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 12: basic excel 453

9. Click cell B4, January 1998. Enter a figure for your January income.

You didn’t make much money in January, and the first year was slow, so you

were living off credit cards at the time; $250 might be about right. Leave off the

dollar sign—just type 250.

10. Press Return (or the down arrow key).

Excel moves the active cell frame to the next row down.

11. Type another number to represent your income for February; press Return.

Repeat steps 9 and 10 until you get to the bottom of the 1998 column.

For this experiment, the exact numbers to type don’t much matter, but Figure

12-12 shows one suggestion.

12. Click in the January 1999 column (C4); fill in the numbers for each month,

pressing Return after each entry. Repeat with the other years.

Remember to type extremely high numbers in the 1999 and 2000 columns (when

venture capitalists poured money into your company), and equally huge nega-

tive numbers (each preceded by a minus sign) for the 2001 column, as the tech-

nology recession hit. Increase the numbers again in 2002, since business picked

up once your advertisers realized that you weren’t going down with the dot-com

ship—not yet anyway.

You’ve successfully populated your spreadsheet with data; choose File→Save to

preserve and name the document. You’ll return to it later in this chapter—after

you’ve read about what Excel can do with all of these numbers.

Formula Fundamentals ...