Tutorial blog 2: Excel

Excel was introduced during week 5.  There are so many different things you can do within excel ranging from very easy to difficult.

We learned about the structure, data basics, creating formulas, and functions during the Excel lessons.

If you have a specific question about something on excel you can either use the excel help button in your excel document or click on the following link: Excel Help

Structure:

Columns are rows are labeled with numbers and letters.  Rows are number from 1 to 1,048,576 and columns are labeled with letter from A to XFD.

We were taught that to re-name a worksheet you must double-click on the "sheet" on the left bottom corner of the sheet you wish to re-name

Data Basics:

To record information as text data in a cell you click "single quote" or put an apostrophe before any information.  Excel stores data by using a serial number.  Excel can determine how many days have passed since January 1st, 1900.  A very large number that could take a while to come up with by hand is solved in seconds on my excel.

Adding rows and columns is easy on excel.  You right click on the cell that you want to add the new row to and click "insert row" and all the old data will move down a row.  Adding a column is the exact same concept except you have to right click on the cell that you wish to move to the right.

This is a brief video explaining how excel works and tricks to saving time by using excel instead of doing each mathematical equation one by one.  It explains great excel is with mathematics and how quickly it can adjust.  This video is from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmSp2-Fa4rg and was created by Excellsfun

Formulas:

To begin a formula you must start with an equal sign (=)

The symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are +, -,  *, and / respectively.

PEMDAS is used to help remember Parentheses, exponetiation, multiplication, division, addition and subtraction

 This is the screen that will come up when you choose to insert a function.  It will explain step by step what to do and what cells to choose to create your function.  This is a picture of the screen on my computer when I was following the steps on how to create a function.

Functions:

The IF function works like a conditional statement.  It checks to see if a function is true and if it is true it returns one value.  If it is false it returns another value.  The syntax for an IF function is: IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], [value_if_false])

so if a student earns an S or U in the class based on their grades the function would be =IF(Total points > 120, if true they receive "S", if false and they don't earn 120 points, they will receive a "U".