Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office 2003 in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You!
  • Introduction
  • Who Should Read This Book?
  • What This Book Does for You
  • Can This Book Really Teach Office 2003 in 24 Hours?
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Part I. Working with Office 2003
  • Hour 1. Getting Acquainted with Office 2003
  • Part II. Processing with Word 2003
  • Hour 2. Welcome to Word 2003
  • Hour 3. Formatting with Word 2003
  • Hour 4. Managing Documents and Customizing Word 2003
  • Hour 5. Advanced Word 2003
  • Part III. Computing with Excel 2003
  • Hour 6. Understanding Excel 2003 Workbooks
    • Starting Excel
    • Understanding Worksheets and Workbooks
    • Entering Worksheet Data
    • Navigating in Excel
    • To Do: Create Your First Worksheet
    • To Do: Format the Worksheet
    • Summary
    • Q&A
  • Hour 7. Restructuring and Editing Excel 2003 Worksheets
  • Hour 8. Using Excel 2003
  • Hour 9. Formatting Worksheets to Look Great
  • Hour 10. Charting with Excel 2003
  • Part IV. Presenting with Flair
  • Hour 11. PowerPoint 2003 Presentations
  • Hour 12. Editing and Arranging Your Presentations
  • Hour 13. PowerPoint 2003 Advanced Features
  • Hour 14. Animating Your Presentations
  • Part V. Organizing with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 15. Communicating with Outlook 2003
  • Hour 16. Planning and Scheduling with Outlook 2003
  • Part VI. Tracking with Access 2003
  • Hour 17. Access 2003 Basics
  • Hour 18. Entering and Displaying Access 2003 Data
  • Hour 19. Retrieving Your Data
  • Hour 20. Reporting with Access 2003
  • Part VII. Combining Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 21. Office 2003 and the Internet
  • Hour 22. Creating Web Content with Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint
  • Part VIII. Publishing Eye-Catching Documents
  • Hour 23. Publishing with Flair Using Publisher 2003
  • Hour 24. Adding Art to Your Publications
  • Part IX. Appendixes
  • Appendix B. Business Contact Manager and Office Extras
  • Part X. Bonus Hours
  • Hour 25. Using FrontPage 2003 for Web Page Design and Creation
  • Hour 26. Managing Your Web with FrontPage

Understanding Worksheets and Workbooks

Excel enables you to create and edit worksheets that you store in workbooks. Typically, people work with a single worksheet (sometimes called a spreadsheet or just sheet). A worksheet is a collection of rows and columns that holds text and numbers, as you see in Figure 6.1. Typically, Excel helps users prepare financial information, but you can manage other kinds of data in Excel, such as a project timeline. If your project requires multiple closely linked worksheets, you can store the worksheets in one large workbook file. A workbook is a collection of one or more worksheets stored in the same file. A company with several divisions might create a workbook with annual sales for each division, and each division might be represented with its own tabbed worksheet inside the workbook.

Any time you create, open, or save an Excel file, you are working with a workbook. Often, that workbook contains only one worksheet. When that's the case, the terms worksheet and workbook are basically synonymous. To open a new Excel worksheet (in a new workbook), select File, New to display the New Document task pane, which is virtually identical to Word's New Document task pane that you learned about in Hour 3, "Formatting with Word 2003."

All Excel files end in the .xls filename extension. Your workbook name is the Excel name you assign when you save a file. You can save Excel worksheets and workbooks in HTML and other formats (such as Lotus 1-2-3 for compatibility and older versions of Excel). When you save your worksheet as an HTML file, you can embed your worksheet data inside a Web page. To save your work, select File, Save; name your Excel workbook and specify the location; and click OK. To load an existing Excel file, use File, Open.

A worksheet is set up in a similar manner to a Word table, except that Excel worksheets can do much more high-end, numeric processing than Word tables can.

Initially, blank Excel workbooks contain three worksheets named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3, as shown at the bottom of Figure 6.1. When you click a sheet's tab, Excel brings that sheet into view. Again, most of the time you'll stick with one worksheet file per workbook, so you'll typically never have to click on the secondary worksheet tabs to bring the other worksheets into view.

Each worksheet column has a heading; heading names start with A, B, and so on. Each row has a heading, starting with 1, 2, and so on. The intersection of a row and column, called a cell, also has a name that comes from combining the column number and row name, such as C4 or A1. A1 is always the top-left cell on any worksheet. The gridlines throughout the worksheet help you to distinguish between cells.

Every cell in your workbook contains a unique name or address to which you can refer when you are tabulating data. This name is called the cell reference, and it is unique for each cell in the worksheet. The cell pointer (the cell with the dark border around it, the active cell that will receive the next character that you type) indicates the active cell, and you learn to select multiple cells later this chapter. The cell pointer's location, also known as the cell reference, appears at the left of the formula bar. (Some refer to the cell reference as the cell address.) In Figure 6.1, the box reads A1 because the mouse pointer is in cell A1.

When you move your mouse pointer across Excel's screen, notice that the pointer becomes a cross when you point or click over a cell. The cross returns to its pointer shape when you point to another part of Excel, such as a toolbar or task pane.

Figure 6.2 shows a worksheet used to create an invoice for a company. Excel's automatic calculation features are perfect for applications, such as invoices, that require totals. With Excel's advanced formatting tools, your worksheets don't have to look as though they conform to a rigid row-and-column grid system.

Figure 6.2 Your Excel worksheets don't have to appear dull and boring.

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