Excel is capable of connecting to external data sources, but those techniques will not be covered in this website. But data can be imported into Excel and manipulated with the commands here. There is also an important “what if” feature of Excel in this menu, and some add-ins that will be quite useful.

There are many built-in formulas for doing calculations, and this menu helps you to find the formulas you need. It also allows for cell naming and auditing, useful for building and debugging spreadsheet models. Finally, calculations of spreadsheets can be controlled here.

This menu controls how the spreadsheet will print. The options here can make the printing quite a bit different from the way the spreadsheet appears on the screen. Most important is to make sure a spreadsheet does not consume too much paper if someone tries to print it.

The insert menu has some functionality that we will look at more carefully in later videos (tables, pivot tables and charts). It also allows for drawings to be added to a spreadsheet, in a layer “above” the actual cells.

The home menu is mostly about formatting cells and spreadsheets.

Add-ins extend the capabilities of Excel and are often written by other companies for specific purposes. This is where you can control the availability of add-ins, and there are also some add-ins provided by Microsoft that you want to make sure are activated (especially the statistics add-in).

The file menu has the usual file functions (open/save/print) and also is the place where add-ins can be monitored. The next post has more details about add-ins for Excel.

At the very top of the Excel window are some useful “quick” commands.

The commands for Excel are organized into “topics” along a ribbon at the top of the screen.

You can always type cell contents directly in the cell, but the Data Entry toolbar is another place to enter data and formulas. This is also where we can see the “names” of cell, either in the A1 format, or with names that are more meaningful.