always on top. In Figure 1-2, Sheet1 is on top. Another way of saying this is that Sheet1 is the active worksheet. There is always one and only one active worksheet. To make another worksheet active, just click its tab.
Guess what’s really cool? You can change the name of the worksheets. Names like Sheet1 and Sheet2 are just not exciting. How about Baseball Card Collection or Last Year’s Taxes? Well, actually Last Year’s Taxes isn’t too exciting either.
The point is, you can give your worksheets meaningful names. You have two ways to do this:
✔ Double-click the worksheet tab and then type a new name.
✔ Right-click the worksheet tab, select Rename from the menu, and then type a new name.
Figure 1-3 shows one worksheet name already changed and another about to be changed by right-clicking its tab.
Figure 1-3: Changing the name of a worksheet.
You can try changing a worksheet name on your own. Do it the easy way:
1. Double-click a worksheet’s tab.
2. Type a new name and press Enter.
To insert a new worksheet into a workbook, click the New Sheet button, which is located after the last worksheet tab. Figure 1-4 shows how. To delete a worksheet, just right-click the worksheet’s tab and select Delete from the menu.
Figure 1-4: Inserting a new worksheet.
You can insert many new worksheets. The limit of how many is based on your computer’s memory, but you should have no problem inserting 200 or more. Of course, I hope you have a good reason for having so many, which brings me to the next point.
Worksheets organize your data. Use them wisely, and you will find it easy to manage your data. For example, say that you are the boss (I thought you’d like that!), and over the course of a year you track information about 30 employees. You may have 30 worksheets – one for each employee. Or you may have 12 worksheets – one for each month. Or you may just keep it all on one worksheet. How you use Excel is up to you, but Excel is ready to handle whatever you throw at it.
Without further ado, I present the Formulas Ribbon. The Ribbon sits at the top of Excel. Items on the Ribbon appear as menu headers along the top of the Excel screen, but they actually work more like tabs. Click them, and no menus appear. Instead, the Ribbon presents the items that are related to the clicked Ribbon tab.
Figure 1-5 shows the top part of the screen, in which the Ribbon displays the items that appear when you click the Formulas header. In the figure, the Ribbon is set to show formula-based methods. At the left end of the Formula Ribbon, functions are categorized. One of the categories is opened to show how you can access a particular function.
Figure 1-5: Getting to know the Ribbon.
These categories are along the bottom of the Formulas Ribbon:
✔ Function Library: This includes the Function Wizard, the AutoSum feature, and the categorized functions.
✔ Defined Names: These features manage named areas.
✔ Formula Auditing: These features have been through many Excel incarnations, but never before have the features been so prominent. Also here is the Watch Window, which lets you keep an eye on the values in designated cells, but within one window. In Figure 1-6 you can see that a few cells have been assigned to the Watch Window. If any values change, you can see this in the Watch Window. Note how the watched cells are on sheets that are not the current active sheet. Neat! By the way, you can move the Watch Window around the screen by clicking the title area of the window and dragging it with the mouse.
✔ Calculation: This is where you manage calculation settings, such as whether calculation is automatic or manual.
Figure 1-6: Eyeing the Watch Window.
A worksheet contains cells. Lots of them. Billions of them. This might seem unmanageable, but actually it’s pretty straightforward. Figure 1-7 shows a worksheet filled with data. Use this to look at a worksheet’s components. Each cell can contain data or a formula. In Figure 1-7, the cells contain data. Some, or even all, cells could contain formulas, but that’s not the case here.
Figure 1-7: Looking at what goes into a worksheet.
Columns have letter headers – A, B, C, and so on. You can see these listed horizontally just above the area where the cells are. After you get past the 26th column, a double lettering system is used – AA, AB, and so on. After all the two-letter combinations are used up, a triple-letter scheme is used. Rows are listed vertically down the left side of the screen and use a numbering system.
You find cells at the intersection of rows and columns. Cell A1 is the cell at the intersection of column A and row 1. A1 is the cell’s address. There is
