Excel Tutorial for Beginners | How to Use Excel

In this Excel for beginners tutorial, I'll give you a quick introduction to Excel, so you can start to feel comfortable inside the application. You'll have an idea where things are, how the spreadsheet is set up and how you can input value. (upbeat music) When you open Excel on your desktop, you get to this view.

You can decide between a blank workbook or if you've opened a recent file in Excel, you will see it pop up here. In this case, I'm just going to go ahead and create a blank workbook. This workbook isn't saved until you decide to do so.

To save the workbook, just go here, click on save and then you can decide where you want to save it. You can also use the shortcut key, control S. A single Excel file is also referred to as a workbook or a spreadsheet.

A workbook consists of at least one sheet. You can easily add more sheets by clicking on the plus here. When you double click on a sheet name, you can change the name and then press enter.

A sheet contains many cells, this box here is a singe cell. You can input numbers or text in here, just start typing and then press enter. If you want to replace this value, just go to that cell and start typing, you don't have to double click, you can type over it.

Each cell has an address, what do you think the address of this cell is, it's D4, which means column D, row four. The intersection of a column and a row is a cell. Up here, you have the formula bar.

Once we input text here, we can see it in the formula bars. If I move to the cell to the side, there is nothing there. Now if instead of text, you have formulas, so if I go to the side here, type in an equal and then go with my arrow keys to D4 and press enter, notice what's in the formula bar.

It has the formula and not the text. In this case, there is no formula, it shows the text. On the left here, we have the name box, this also shows us the active cell address, so in his case it's D4, when I go here, it's F4.

Now here's a useful tip for you, you can also use this to jump to a specific cell. Just type in the cell address. So let's say I want to jump to A100, I'm going to type it in, press enter and I jump to that cell.

Now to jump back to the first cell, you can use the shortcut key, control home. On the Excel grid, you can select multiple rows or multiple columns. Just go with your mouse and highlight the rows or highlight columns, just select and drag.

There are also a lot of shortcuts in Excel you can use. So for example, the shortcut key control space, selects an entire column. If I hold down the shift key and the arrow keys, I can select multiple columns.

Now I have a separate video in Excel shortcuts and I've added the link to the description of this video. Now here, if you right mouse click, you're going to get a lot of options. You can for example, insert columns in between these.

If I right mouse click again, I can delete the columns that are in between these and since we're talking about shortcuts, a great shortcut is to use control plus to insert columns or rows and control minus to delete them. An Excel sheet has more than 16000 columns and over a million rows. Now you can see that by jumping to the bottom of the sheet, if you use the shortcut key control and then the arrow down key.

This jumps to the last row in Excel. If I use the control key and the right arrow key, I jump to the last column. Now the way to get back, do you remember where that shortcut was?

That was control, home. Another term you need to know is range. A range is a group of cells.

If I highlight this area, so just click on the first cell and then drag. If you want to use your keyboard key, just select the first cell and then hold down shift and highlight the other cells with your arrow keys. Now how do I reference this range?

What's the address of it? You reference it by the address of the cell on the top left hand corner and the bottom right hand corner separated by a column. So this would be D4 until F7.

So you would write that as this, D4, to with a column, F7. Now this is something that's going to be used inside formulas. So whenever you see a syntax like this, this is referencing a range of cells.

If I wanted to move the value of this cell to another cell, I could use the move handle. So this here that you see, this mouse icon, this is the selection icon. So you just go and click and you're selecting a cell, if you drag, you select a range.

But here, if I move it to the boarder, I get this four arrows, that's the move icon. When you see this, you can click and drag and you move the content of that cell somewhere else. You can also use the shortcut key control X and control V, to cut and paste.

Okay, so we have the selection handle, we have the move handle, there is another handle that's called the fill handle. So when you go to the side, to the corner of the cell, you get this cross that symbol, if you drag that, you fill the content of the cells below with the cell above. So in this case, because I have text, I am filling them up with the text.

If I drag the formula, I'm going to fill these up with the formula, so if I go here, it's the formula that's been copied down. Cells have a default size here but you can change them. So for example, if I input text that's too long, it's going to go over to the next cell.

So it looks like the contents of this is in these cells as well but it's not, it's only sitting in this cell. You can see that from the formula bar, when I'm here, there is nothing in that cell. To expand the column, I can hover my mouse over here and just drag.

Or, I can double click to make the column expand, to be big enough to fit the content of my cell. Now you might not want to expand it horizontally, you might prefer to let it flow vertically. So instead of it going all the way to the side and your column being so wide, you want to keep the width like this but you want the row to expand.

Now even if I pull down the row, this is not going to wrap inside the cell. There is a setting for this and it's right here, it gives you the ability to wrap the text. Now if you see that the whole text is not fitting here because the new part is missing, just double click on the row to make it expand to fit.

If you want to unwrap this text, just click on the wrap setting here and it's going to unwrap it. You'll find a lot of widely used options in Excel if you right mouse click, so if you right mouse click on a cell, you get the ability to insert, delete, you can clear the contents, add a comment and so on. If you right mouse click on a column, you get similar options and some additional ones that only apply to columns.

Now let's take a look at Excel's menu. This is commonly referred to as the ribbon. It consists of different tabs, every time you click on a tab, the options in the menu bar change.

The most common one is the home tab, here's where you can do formatting and common tabs like inserting, deleting or sorting and filtering data. If I go to the insert tab, I can insert a chart here or insert pivot tables. If you hover over a feature, you get more information about the feature and also the shortcut key you can use for that feature if it has one.

Now it does pay off, if you take some time and go through the different tabs and the different options you have. One comment option I use is for example, to hide the grid lines. This is something you can do from the page layout tab under grid lines, take away this check mark and the grid lines are gone.

So this is good for creating reports and dashboards. Click it again and the grid lines are back. Some of the groupings have additional options.

You can see that from this tilted arrow here. So if I click this, I come to this dialogue box. Now a lot of these options might be duplicates, it's just these options organize differently but you might have some additional options in here as well.

If you want to increase the space of your grid, you can collapse the ribbon. Just go to this arrow here and collapse the ribbon or use the shortcut key, control, F1. Every time you go and select a tab, the ribbon appears, when you click away, it disappears.

To make it stick again, you can pin it or use the shortcut key, control F1. The file tab is different to the rest. This is also referred to as the backstage view.

Here you can see information about your file, you can save it as PDF, you can print it out, or you can check which version of Excel you have by going and checking your account. To go back to normal view, either use the arrow here or press escape. Now let's go to the data tab and there is some shortcuts when it comes to inputting values.

So here, I'm going to input headcount by department, for a few different months. I want to give this a title, so I'll call this, headcount by department, and press enter. Now let's say I want to go from Jan till June, I can just type in Jan here.

Now when I press tab, I go to the next cell. By default, if I press enter, you go to the cell below. If you want to press enter and stay on the same cell, you have to press control enter.

Now if I go to the next cell, I can type in Feb and then March and so on but Excel has this already built in. So if you type in Jan, it recognizes that this is a month, now when I pull this to the side, notice I can see May and then at the bottom I have June here. So now the first department is marketing, I'll just type it in.

If you ever need to go to edit mode, you can press F2. This is going to take you to the end of the text that you have, so if you want to continue with that text, you can just start typing. So and sales for example.

If you just start typing over the cell, remember, it's going to replace everything that was in the cell. I'm typing marketing here then I'm going to press tab, let's say type in 20 and then 20 and 20 and in case this is 20 for all these months, again, don't forget that you can use the filler handle. So you can click and drag and if you want a shortcut for this, there is one, just highlight with the keyboard keys and then press control R.

This is going to fill to the right. Now when you're on the end here and you press enter, you jump to the cell below. One way to make it easier for you to input a bunch of data, is to highlight the area first.

So in this case, when I highlight this, notice when I press tab and I get here and I press tab again, it goes to the first cell of the next row, so now I can type and then press tab, tab, tab and so on. To get out of this, you can just click away or use the arrow key to move out of the space. Now I'm just quickly going to add some data to this and then let's do some formatting.

Okay, so now we have some more data, let's adjust the formatting of this. I want to center this across my report. So highlight the range, go to home and merge these cells.

When you click it, it automatically merges and centers the cell. We can make these bold, highlight and click on bold. And while we're here, let's also adjust the cell width, to match the content of the cell.

So I'm going to highlight all of these together and then double click to make this fit. Now if it's too tight for you, you can expand this a little bit. If you just select any of these while the rest are highlighted, it's going to make the same adjustment to the rest as well.

Now you can go ahead and add color to this or add boarders, so here you have a bottom boarder, you'll have thick bottom boarder, so let's go with that. In case you want to move something to be in the middle, so let's say I don't want HR on the bottom, I want HR between marketing and sales, you can select it and then use the move handle to move it but while you're moving it, don't just drop it because if you try to do that, it says there's already data in there, do you want to replace it? No, we definitely don't want to replace it.

So what we want to do is bring it and put it in between marketing and sales. So while you're dragging this, hold down the shift key and then you see that line changes, it shows you where it's going to drop it. Now if you let go of the mouse, it's going to drop HR in between marketing and sales.

Now you have other options to do this as well, if you don't want to use this combination, just right mouse click and cut or use the shortcut key control X and then go to where you want this range to sit, right mouse click and insert cut cells. Let's give the title some color as well and if you ever adjust the formatting of the cell and you want to apply that formatting to other cells, you can use the paintbrush icon. So for example, let's say for some reason I made this red and I want to apply that to the other ones, I can just go and click on the paintbrush, click on the cell I want and it automatically applies the formatting.

Now this is not just for color, it's any type of formatting you have, it can be a combination of bold font, cell boarders and so on. If you want to apply that formatting to multiple cells, double click on this paintbrush and then you can reuse that formatting and apply to multiple cells. Once you're done, press escape to remove it.

If you want to sum up these values, you can go to home and sum them from here. There's also a great shortcut key for this which is alt equals. When you click it, it tries to pick up the range, this is correct, you just have to press enter.

Now you can fill the rest in and the formula will be copied over and the ranges will reflect the direct ranges above. If you want to do this in one go, you can first select your area and just use the shortcut key, alt equals and you're done. This wraps up our introduction to Excel in case you like to learn more about Excel and other features and functions, check out the other videos I have on this channel.

Now if you really like to master Excel and learn by solving actual problems, check out my Excel essentials course on Excelplus. com. Link to it is below the video.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, if you did, hit that thumbs up and do subscribe to this channel in case you haven't subscribed already, so you can improve your Excel skills and learn some tips and tricks when it comes to Office apps. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.