It’s convenient because you don’t have to open the Format Cells dialog separately and do it there. This floating menu is kind of a popular options toolbar that lets you quickly change the font, change the text size, format the cell as money or percentage, lets you change the background or font color and add borders to the cell. You’ll notice in the image above, a normal right-click menu that starts with Cut, Copy, etc, but you’ll also notice a kind of floating toolbar right above the menu. Now there are two options you have at this point. Click on cell A1 and drag the mouse while holding the button down to cell D1. Let’s change the color of the first row to something else so that we can clearly separate the header from the data. Now let’s look more at how we can format Excel cells. The grid is now nicely centered with all the data directly underneath the headings. Then click on the Home tab and click on the Center Justify button. Click on cell A1 and drag your mouse down to cell D6 to highlight the entire data set: First, let’s center all the data so that things look nicer. Right now our table doesn’t look very nice since the text and numbers are aligned differently and the headers are not visually separate from the data. Now let’s learn some of the basics of formatting cells in Excel. Now we have a 5×4 grid, so let’s fill out some fake test grades also as shown below:

Now let’s enter Test 1, Test 2, and Test 3 into cells B1, C1, and D1 respectively. Let’s type Students into well A1 and then type A through E as the student names continuing down column A as shown below: A1 is the very first cell in an Excel worksheet. A cell is simply a particular row number and column, i.e. In Excel, the columns are labeled starting from A and continuing to Z and beyond. Sounds like a simple problem and it is (once you get the formula in your head)! Excel can do this for you very quickly, so let’s see how.įirst off, let’s enter some data into the cells in Excel. The best way to learn anything is to actually do something useful and Excel is the best example of this! Let’s say you are a high school or college teacher and you want to keep track of your student’s grades, calculate their average and tell them the lowest grade they would need to get on their final exam in order to pass the class. This is where you can perform many common tasks such as opening a workbook, creating a new one, printing and more. On older versions of Excel the task pane was located on the right side of the screen, however that has now been removed and all the functions have been moved to the File tab. This is the default number that every Excel workbook starts off with. That way you can easily see which commands are already not on the ribbon and then add any you feel you’ll need.Īt the bottom of the screen, you’ll see three sheets, named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3.

Also, one option I really like is choosing Commands Not in the Ribbon from the dropdown. By default, it shows you the popular commands, but you can click on the dropdown to see all the possible options for different tabs. Now click on Customize Ribbon at the bottom left and you’ll be able to add or remove any possible option you could possibly want. If you want to customize the ribbon interface, i.e., add a button or option that you miss from an older version of Excel, you can do that by clicking on File and then clicking on Options.

These little icons let you perform very common Excel functions like adding or deleting rows in the worksheet or freezing panes, etc. Across the top, you have the Excel ribbon with multiple tabs and also a bunch of little icons at the top in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Tutorial on how to use microsoft excel