Excel Basics: One-Stop Solution for All The Fundamentals in Excel

What is Microsoft Excel?

Microsoft Excel is spreadsheet software designed and developed by Microsoft for various computing devices running on Windows, Linux, Android, and Mac Operating systems. MS Excel performs business intelligence and data analytics functions by generating visually appealing charts.

Now that you know what Excel is, you will move ahead and learn the Excel basics.

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Microsoft Excel Basics - The Fundamentals

Microsoft Excel is one of the software tools that come along with the Microsoft Office Software. You can download Microsoft Office from the Microsoft Official Website.

Once you download Microsoft Office and install it into your local system, you can get started with Microsoft Excel. The Microsoft Excel Home Page looks as follows.

Inside the Home page, you have a variety of sheet options provided by Microsoft, based on the usage. You can choose to get started with a basic simple worksheet or modify your sheet based on your preferences.

Business Data is one such example.

Once you have selected your type of sheet, you will have the following options offered by MS Excel.

The Toolbar in MS Excel has all the tools that you need to store and manipulate your data. 

• The File Option:

It helps you with a set of operations to navigate your existing file, to print, save or create a new sheet.

• The Home Option:

It will have the onboard tools to change your font, font color, and spreadsheet format.

• The Insert Option

The Insert option will help you insert data into your sheet. The data can be an image or any data from either your local system or an online source.

• The Draw Option

The Draw option helps you to withdraw any specific visualizations into your Excel sheet.

Example - Lines, Marks.

• The Page Layout Option

The next option is the Page Layout. The Page Layout option provides the page printing options to modify the way your sheet could represent the data.

• The Formula Option

The Formulas option will help you with the inbuilt business analytical formulas.

• The Data Option

Data options will help you with data sources, queries, and data management options.

• The Review Option

The Review option will help with spellings, worksheet statistics, and notes.

• The View Option

The View option is similar to the page layout. This option will help you with basic operations like zoom, page setup, etc.

• The Help Option

The Help option provides you with the possibility of contacting the technical support team and so on.

• The Power Pivot Option

The Power Pivot option provides the options to manage workbooks and formulas used in the sheet.

• The Toolbar Ribbon

Each Toolbar option has a set of sub-options that fit into a tray called Tool-bar Ribbon. The Ribbon looks like shown below.

• The Group

Each Ribbon has specific functions, and all the functions are categorized into groups. Each group is made up of functions that are interrelated to each other and have a dedicated functionality.

For example, the ‘Font Group’ shown below is dedicated to working on the font style, size, and color.

It is often a little complicated to fit in all the functionalities in one group. So all the groups have a pop-up icon dedicated to storing the additional functionalities as a "More Options" dialogue box, as shown in the image below.

Excel Sheet

Now, you enter into the sheet part. The MS Excel Sheet is made out of rows and columns. The intersection of rows and columns is known as a cell. Each cell in Excel is represented with an address. In the image below, you have a cell with address B3, where B is the row address, and 3 is the column address.

In the bottom section, you have the sheet tracker, which will help you track the worksheet you are currently working on.

And lastly, you have the sheet size that helps you adjust your sheet size.

Moving ahead, you will create a simple employee data sheet using MS Excel.

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Creating Employee Database Using Microsoft Excel

In this particular sheet, you are going to include some of the essential data about employees. 

You will include the following columns:

• Serial Number
• Employee Name
• Employee Number
• Designation
• Salary
• Hike Percentage
• New Salary
• Blood Group
• Phone Number

The employee data can be created, as shown in the image below.

There is also a column that includes the updated salary of all the employees. The column is created by using a simple percentage calculation, as shown below.

With that, you have come to an end of this tutorial on "Your One-Stop Solution To Understand Excel Basics”.

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Next Steps

The next stop in your journey to mastering Excel should be "Charts in Excel". Visually appealing charts to represent the data insights is a crucial method in business analytics and essential to a role in the field.

If you are Interested in learning or perhaps moving into the field of Business Analytics, Simplilearn’s Business Analytics certification is your best bet. This career-oriented, completely online certification course is designed to provide the essential set of fundamental skills and teach you the job-critical concepts of data analysis and statistics. After completing this course, you will have the tools and the expertise needed to extract insights from the data available, and effectively present those insights by way of executive-level dashboards that help businesses take data-driven decisions.

Do you have any questions or feedback for us on this “Excel Basics” Article? If yes, please feel free to share them with our team via the comments section of this page. We’d be happy to review and respond to them for you.

Happy learning!