Excel

Experiment 6:
Introduction to the Excel, Ribbon Toolbar, Home Tab and Entering Data
into Spreadsheet and calculating sum and average

Creating a New Excel Worksheet

There are 4 ways to open excel
1. Start->Programs-Click Excel application
2. Type excel in windows search and click excel application
3. Right Click in File manager or on desktop -> click ‘new’ -> Microsoft excel worksheet
4. Start-> Type ‘run’ and in the ‘run’ dialog box, type ‘excel’ and click ‘ok’
Basic Terms
1. Each Excel file is called as ‘workbook’
2. Each workbook has several sheets called ‘worksheets’
3. In each worksheet there are rows (with row number on left side such as 1, 2, 3 etc) and
columns (with column name at the top such as A, B, C etc)
4. Each box in the worksheet is called as a ‘cell’
5. There are maximum of ‘10,48,576’ rows and columns till ‘XFD’ in a worksheet
Entering Values and Saving the sheet
1. Click on the cell wherever needed and start typing any name or number. Selected cell gets
highlighted in bold border.
2. Enter Student Name, Roll Number, Marks as a column names and enter data of your choice
until 10 rows
3. Go to file and click on ‘saveas’ and give filename ‘exercise-8’ and save the file on the
desktop inside your roll number folder
4. Note that excel files are saved with the file extension as ‘.xlsx’
Formatting the Data
1. Use the ribbon menu under ‘home’ tab to format the data in the cells
2. Bold the cell, change the font to times new roman, cell colour, text colour etc
3. Give the borders to the whole table using the borders command
Sum and Average functions
1. Function to calculate sum is sum(). Click on any cell where you want to calculate the sum.
Type the function name as ‘=sum(‘ in the cell and drag the area that has the values on which
you want to calculate the sum. Alternatively, the cell range can be typed into the () brackets
such as ‘=sum(E3:E10)’ that calculates sum of values starting from E2 cell to E10 cell. Press
enter to see the sum calculated automatically.
2. Similarly, the function for calculating average is average(). Click on any cell where you
want to calculate the average. Type the function name as ‘=average(‘ in the cell and drag the
area that has the values on which you want to calculate the sum. Alternatively, the cell range
can be typed into the () brackets such as ‘=average(E3:E10)’ that calculates sum of values
starting from E2 cell to E10 cell. Press enter to see the average value calculated
automatically.

Additional Tips
1. Double clicking on the line that separates the column labels at the top will make the
column widths fit to the width of the data
2. Wrap text option can be used when a long cell data needs to be brought down to the next
line but within the same cell