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Learn Excel 2013

Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction Introduction to Excel 2013.......................................................................................7 What’s New ...........................................................................................................11 Chapter 2: Using Touch Overview of Principles ..........................................................................................14 Chapter 3: Getting Started Starting and Closing Excel; Workbook, Cells, Rows, & Columns .......................16 Templates; Creating, Opening, and Saving a Workbook ......................................20 Chapter 4: Help Online, Offline, and Contextual Help ....................................................................24 Chapter 5: Settings and Preferences Excel Options .........................................................................................................27 Chapter 6: The Ribbon and Toolbars Ribbon Interface.....................................................................................................32 Quick Access Toolbar ............................................................................................38 Mini Toolbar ..........................................................................................................41 Chapter 7: Backup and Recovery Create Backup Option; Auto-Recover and Autosave ............................................43

Chapter 8: Entering and Deleting Data Entering Text and Numbers ...................................................................................46 Date Formats ..........................................................................................................51 Formatting Cells; Editing and Deleting Data.........................................................56 Fill ..........................................................................................................................61 Flash Fill ................................................................................................................65 Chapter 9: Formatting a Worksheet Themes and Cell Styles ..........................................................................................67 Inserting, Deleting, Hiding and Adjusting Rows and Columns.............................72 Wrap Text and Alignment .....................................................................................77 Merging Cells; Applying Themes and Styles ........................................................82 Borders ...................................................................................................................86 Chapter 10: Copy, Paste and Paste Special Copy, Cut and Paste ...............................................................................................90 Chapter 11: Proofing Spell checking ........................................................................................................96 Chapter 12: Managing Worksheets Moving, Copying, Inserting, Deleting and Locking Sheets; Multiple Worksheets101 Chapter 13: Comments

Inserting Comments .............................................................................................106 Chapter 14: Viewing and Printing Workbook Views, Zoom and Freeze ...................................................................109 Printing; Headers, Footers and Margins ..............................................................113 Chapter 15: Formulas and Functions Overview of Formulas and Functions ..................................................................118 Cell References ....................................................................................................123 Names ..................................................................................................................128 Finding Errors; New Excel Functions..................................................................133 Chapter 16: Working with Workbooks Multiple Workbooks and Windows; Comparing Workbooks .............................138 Chapter 17: Find and Replace Go to; Find and Replace Options .........................................................................142 Chapter 18: Conditional Formatting Applying, Clearing and Managing Rules.............................................................146 Chapter 19: Graphing and Charting Chart Types; Chart Recommendation ..................................................................151 Basic Formatting ..................................................................................................156 Selecting Data, Positioning and Printing Charts ..................................................162

Chapter 20: File Types Saving Workbooks; PDF and CSV Formats ........................................................167 Chapter 21: Managing Data Sorting ..................................................................................................................171 Filtering ................................................................................................................174 Tables ...................................................................................................................178 Chapter 22: Functions Case Study VLOOKUP ..........................................................................................................183 Text Function .......................................................................................................188 Date and Time Functions .....................................................................................190 Logical Functions.................................................................................................192 Chapter 23: Analyzing Data Financial Analysis Case Study - Part 1 ................................................................198 Financial Analysis Case Study - Part 2 ................................................................204 Quick Analysis Tool ............................................................................................207 Chapter 24: Shapes and Pictures Adding and Formatting Shapes, Picture, Clip Art, WordArt and SmartArt ........210 Chapter 25: Sharing and Protecting Protecting Worksheets .........................................................................................215

Protecting Workbooks .........................................................................................218 Sharing and SkyDrive ..........................................................................................222 Chapter 26: More Backstage View Options Trust Center; Export; Inspect Workbook .............................................................227 Chapter 27: Closing Summary; More Help ..........................................................................................229

Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 1 – Introduction Video: Introduction to Excel 2013 Toby: Hello and welcome to our course on Excel 2013. My name is Toby and I’m your instructor on this course. Excel 2013 is the latest version of Microsoft’s Excel product and Excel is the world’s most popular spreadsheet product. It’s used on PC’s, on Macs, and soon on various other devices and literally millions of people around the world use Excel every day not only for things like personal finances, but also it’s used in big business. And it’s very important in areas of business such as finance. First of all, I’d like to talk about who this course is for. If you haven’t used a spreadsheet product before and in particular if you haven’t used Microsoft Excel before, this course is for you. I’m going to be going right from the basics of Excel and hopefully I’ll be explaining it in enough detail that you can get up to speed pretty quickly. I will be assuming that you have a reasonable knowledge of using a Windows-based operating system. So I won’t be explaining terms like what a mouse is and what a click is and so on; and scrollers and scroll bars and dialogs. I’m assuming that standard Windows terminology and Windows usage you’re familiar with. But I won’t be assuming anything about knowledge of how spreadsheets work and how to use a spreadsheet program. If you’ve used Microsoft Excel before in an earlier version then what I’m going to do at various points is to point out in certain sections that maybe there’s a part you can skip or maybe there’s a part you could go through quickly because there’s no significant change in this new version. Having said that, if the version of Excel you’re used to is older than the 2007 version, so if you’ve been using Excel 2000, for example, or Excel 2003, then this version is so different that you probably need to go through the whole thing. You won’t be used to the Ribbon interface, whereas people with a newer version, 2010, 2007 version, will be familiar with the Ribbon interface. Although to be fair, there are some significant changes in the Ribbon in this version as we’ll see a little bit later on.

© Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So if you’re familiar with Excel, a version 2007 or newer, then there will be a few parts that you can skip or go through quickly. If you’re used to an older version or you’re completely new to Excel, I suggest you sit back and enjoy the whole course. The next thing I’d like to talk about is the sort of device that you’re using to run Excel 2013. The device that I’m recording this on is a conventional PC in a way, but it also has a touch screen and I can use gestures, hand gestures, in front of the screen. Now in the course, mainly, I’m going to be using keyboard and mouse because that is still the way that most people use Microsoft Excel. I will be using touch screen once or twice just to demonstrate what any of the differences are and I’ll cover touch screen in general a little bit later on. It’s important to recognize that some of the changes in Excel 2013 are in fact intended to accommodate people that use touch screens. So it’s quite an important factor. But I won’t be using touch screen extensively. If you are using touch screen to use Excel, then I hope that I’ll cover enough material that you can proceed with confidence using the touch screen facilities of your PC, laptop, tablet, or whatever sort of device you’re using. The next thing to look at is what operating systems you can run Excel 2013 on. Excel 2013 is part of Office 2013 and to run Office 2013 the Microsoft Website gives you a list of the operating systems you can use. These include the main two desktop systems which are Windows 7 and Windows 8. So if you’ve got either Windows 7 or Windows 8, then you’re fine with Office 2013 and therefore Excel 2013. It will also run on the more recent Windows Server products, 2008 release to R2 and Windows Server 2012. If you have an older version of Windows such as Vista or XP, then Office 2013 is not supported on those products. So if you’re thinking of converting to Excel 2013, I’m afraid you’re going to need to convert your operating system as well if it’s older than Windows 7 on a PC. Now at the time of recording this, there is also talk about which version of Office 2013 or should I say how much of Office 2013 will be available on tablets and particularly on the Microsoft surface tablet. It looks as though there will be a pretty complete version of Office 2013 available and it will be able to run on the surface tablet. But at the time of recording this is not certain. There’s no pricing and there’s no actual specification released by Microsoft for this. So maybe by the time you’re watching this it’s something you can look out for. Whether it will run on any other device that you’ve got, if it’s


Learn Excel 2013 not in a category I’ve already mentioned, it’s something you’re going to have to check either via the manufacturer of your device or via the Microsoft website. The next thing to point out is that there are several versions of Office 2013, all of which include Excel 2013 and here we can see we have Office Home and Student 2013, Office Professional 2013, and Office Home and Business 2013. Now there are others. The version I’m using here is one that’s called Office Professional Plus 2013 which has even more components in it. And you can also see in the list there that there’s something called Office 365 which is effectively the online version of a collection of these applications. Now I’m going to talk about Office 365 a little bit later on. For the moment my focus is going to be on Excel 2013. But it’s worth knowing what the 365 version of Excel is like as well, and as I say I’ll return to that later on. So, you can see the versions that you can get plus some others and you know that you have to be on Windows 7 or Windows 8. Let’s talk about getting Excel 2013 installed and setup on your device. Well the first thing to say is that you need a device which is up to the job of running Office 2013. If you’re running Windows 7 or Windows 8, then it’s very likely that your device is up to that job anyway. But if you search on Microsoft.com for Office 2013 requirements, you can see a full hardware specification there, computer and processor 1 gigahertz, memory at least 1 gig of RAM, etc. 2 gig for the 64 bit version of Office 2013, and then Hard Disk availability, browser versions, and so on. So you should really make sure that you tick all of the boxes before you install Office 2013 to start to use it. Now what I’m not going to do is take you through how to install Office 2013. The instructions you need are available from Microsoft. If you bought a packaged version of Office 2013, perhaps from your local computer store or mail order, then there will be the basic instructions you need included with that.

If you’re planning to use a preview version or if you’re

downloading a version of Office 2013 from Microsoft, then the instructions for installation are accessible from the same place where you download the preview or other version. And I’m going to assume that from this point onwards in the course you have installed Office 2013 and it’s basically ready to use and that you’re going to be able to start Excel 2013.


Learn Excel 2013 So I’m assuming that you have Office 2013 and therefore Excel 2013 installed correctly and ready to use. The other assumption I’m going to make is that you have access to the exercise files that come with this course. You may well have them in a different folder to the one that I’ve got them and the list you see may be slightly different from the list that I’m looking at here, but you’ll see a list of files with names similar to these and we’re going to be referring to these throughout the course. What I’ve done is to put a shortcut to this folder on my desktop to make it easy for me to find the exercise files. So you should be ready now to start using Excel 2013. Before we actually do, we’re going to have a short section on what’s new in Excel 2013. This won’t necessarily mean much to you if you haven’t used Excel before. But I think it’s worth just following me as I go through this because some of the terminology and the overview of some of the changes may help you in the rest of the course. So, I’ll see in that next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: What’s New Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m going to take a pretty quick look at what’s new in Excel 2013. If you haven’t used Excel before, what’s new may not mean very much to you, but this is quite a short section and I still think it’s worth you going through this section because it will also highlight some of the features that I’ll be concentrating on as they are new ones. So first of all, there’s a whole section on what’s new in Office 2013 and within that there’s a section on what’s new in Excel 2013. There’s a video at the beginning that takes you through the main points. There are quite a few new features; some of them are really quite small in terms of the overall scale and scope of Excel 2013. And to be fair, some of them are quite advanced topics which you’d really need to look at our advanced course to be able to see the impact of. But what I’m going to do here is just go through the main ones that will affect us on this course and I suggest you go through what’s new in Excel 2013 on the Microsoft website, particularly if you’ve used Excel before, and there you can get links to some of the changes in more detail. Now for existing users, people who have used earlier versions of Excel, one of the most noticeable difference will be the change of the overall look and feel. We’re going to look at Excel 2013 in the next section and one of the things you’ll notice is that everything seems to be a little bit more open, everything seems to be a little bit less crowded. And one of the reasons for this is that the whole of Office 2013 now is geared up for use with touch devices and therefore allowing for people with slightly fat fingers, my fingers are probably slightly fat fingers, it gives you a little bit more space to use touch on the screen. Now that’s not to say the use of touch has taken over, far from it. But if you’re trying to use a product like Excel with a touch screen, you do need a certain amount of flexibility in terms of being able to touch the screen accurately, particularly as with Excel you may have a very large amount of data on a worksheet. So if you’re a new user, one of the things you’ll notice is there seems to be a lot more space which in itself I think is not a bad thing anyway. Another key feature when you first open Excel 2013 is that you’ll see a page where you can start with one of the provided templates. And with Excel 2013, templates do most of the setup and design work for you. Now if you’re creating a spreadsheet for a common type of application, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 there’s a good chance that Excel 2013 will include a template that you can start to work from. Of course, the use of Excel is so wide now, and the number of applications is so wide, that there can’t possibly be a template for every possible job.

But if you’re doing something

straightforward, perhaps like a budget or something like that, the chances are there’ll be something that will get you started at least. Now the next two or three topics that are new in Excel 2013 are, first of all, Quick Analysis Tool which enables you to do pretty much instant data analysis on a set of data. And there’s also a Flash Fill facility that lets you fill out an entire column of data in a flash, as it says there. There is also what I think is really quite a significant new tool, which is a Chart Recommendations Tool. Now if you’re familiar with Excel, you’ll know that a lot of its strength is in its ability to draw very sophisticated charts. And there are so many types of chart and they can be customized to such a high level that sometimes it’s difficult to work out which chart is the best one to use in your situation. Well, Excel 2013 includes a facility now to recommend a chart and this is one of the tools that we will be looking at on this course. Now to be fair, a lot of the other changes in Excel 2013 also relate to charting and some of them are really quite advanced features to do with pivot tables and charts, slices, and the like. And although we’ll be able to look at some of those on this course, for many of them you’ll need to look at our advanced course. Now if you’ve used Excel before, you’ll know that you quite often finish up in a situation where you’re working on two or even more workbooks at the same time. If that’s the case in Excel 2013, it’s worth noting that each workbook has its own Window. And that makes it very easy to switch between two when you’re working on two at the same time, perhaps transferring data between them. But it also makes things a lot easier when you’re using two monitors which, of course, nowadays is an increasingly popular way of working. I mentioned just now that one of the strengths of Excel is its charting capabilities. Another of its strengths is the calculation facilities provided by the range of Excel functions that are available. Well, in Excel 2013, there are many new functions related to math, trigonometry, statistics, engineering, lookup references, many, many new functions, and other calculation facilities that we’ll touch on later on in the course.


Learn Excel 2013 Now increasingly people are storing data online. You may well be aware of SkyDrive. You may already have a free SkyDrive setup. And your organization, your company may use Office 365. Well, there are various ways that you can save and share files online in Excel 2013. You can also do things like embed worksheet data in a webpage. And there is a new feature using link to share an Excel worksheet in an online meeting, for example. And we’ll be looking at some of these features of Excel 2013 a little bit later on in the course. One of the other things you’ll notice on the Microsoft list is saving to a new file format, the new strict open XML spreadsheet file format. This is an ISO based new format. And then after that in the Microsoft list what we basically have is a list of many of the new charting features. Now if you’re new to Excel many of these won’t mean very much to you. If you’re not new to Excel there are extensions to the capabilities of data labeling. You can view animation in charts. You’ve also got improvements to pivot tables, slices, and so on. Now I’m not going to go through all of these charting facilities now, some of these we’re going to come up with later on. But then once we get to the end of the extensions to the charting facilities, there are also some new what are called Inquire Add-In facilities which help you to analyze and review your workbooks to look for any design issues, any functional issues, any broken links, that kind of thing. So the list is actually quite a long list. Many of them are quite small and esoteric features but quite important. But two or three of them are really very significant. So I hope you found that quick run through of the new features useful. And in the next section we’re going to quickly look at what to be aware of if you’re using a touch device. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 2 – Using Touch Video: Overview of Principles Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. It may well be that you’re using a touch device to use Excel 2013. You may, as I do, use a combination of touch, keyboard, and mouse when you’re using Office applications. Now to look at the detail of using touch with Excel 2013, particularly if you’re new to it, we’re going to have to wait until we get a little bit further on in the course because many of the touch gestures that you can use depend on an understanding of what you’re trying to do with them and until we get to that point in the course it won’t really make much sense for me to go through all of the different touch gestures now. But I’d like to point you in the right direction on a couple of early things. And one of them is that if you want to get access to a good document to help you with the use of touch in Office 2013 in general and Excel 2013 specifically, you can access that from the Excel Help. We’re going to be opening Excel in a moment and looking at Excel 2013. Once it’s open you can get help by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard. There’s also a link to Help which we’ll see a little bit later on. And if you then search the Help for the word Touch as I’ve done here, you will see the Office Touch Guide and that gives you a pretty good guide to using touch with Office 2013 in general. Now if you’re used to using touch you’ll be familiar with much of this terminology. So instead of left click, it’s tap. You also have features like using pinch where you pinch fingers together, stretch where you do the opposite of pinch. Then we have slide, swipe, and the like. Now I’m going to use those terms from time to time, particularly early on in the course when I talk about the alternative ways of doing certain things and how to do them on a touch device. But it gets really rather repetitive and rather boring if I have to say every time I do anything on the course all of the different ways of doing it. So once I’ve introduced one of the touch related gestures then I’m generally not going to use it again or at least I’ll use it rarely in the rest of the course. There are, of course, many things other than the simple ones I’ve mentioned there. So if I go a little bit further down this document, you have things like in an Office program if you want to customize the Quick Access Toolbar, if you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about I’ll explain that later on. It tells here to do that with touch press, hold, and release any button. Now with © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 these various things I’m going to come back to them when we come to the relevant point in the Excel course and look at it at least once. And then a little bit further down this document, past the areas that are generally Office 2013 there are some specific things that relate to Excel; so how to edit Excel, how to select a range of data, how to clear a cells content. So these are specific. And then later on we have specifics for other programs in the suite such as PowerPoint. So in the short term if you want to get access to that document and let it just explain all of the basic touch gestures, you’re going to need, then that’s a good place to start. And as I say when we get to each of those in the course I’ll talk about the touch equivalent when I cover it using keyboard and mouse. So that’s a lightening quick review of where to find information about using touch. I’ll be coming back to that later on during the course. I think it’s time we opened Excel and took a look at it. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 3 – Getting Started Video: Starting and Closing Excel; Workbook, Cells, Row, & Columns Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to our first look at Excel and the first thing I want to talk about is how you’re going to start Excel each time that you’re going to run it. Now there are several ways of doing this and the way I’m going to do it on this occasion is I’ve actually put a shortcut to Excel 2013 on my Windows desktop. I’m running this course on Windows 8 and I, of course, I could start Excel 2013 from my Start Screen by tapping the relevant tile on my Start Screen. I could pin Excel 2013 to my taskbar on the Windows 8 desktop. So there’s three different ways of starting it. Of course, if you’re using Windows 7, you’ll have a Start Menu you could start it from or indeed pin it to the Start Menu. So whichever way you start it let’s get Excel 2013 started. There’s my shortcut. I’m actually going to double tap and Excel 2013 opens up. Now even if you’ve used Excel 2010, this Start Screen will seem rather strange to you. It’s nothing like the one you’re used to. It’s even Excel 2010. So let me just do a quick tour of this screen. On the left we have facilities to open existing workbooks. And as we work through the first few workbooks on the course, we’ll see recently opened workbooks appearing in a list on the left here. This is particularly useful to enable you to open work you’ve been doing recently. But this General button here, Open other Workbooks, gives us access to any workbooks that are available. The bigger right hand section here is basically the one for creating new workbooks and the emphasis in Excel 2013 is to give you access to a range of templates that you can use as a starting point for workbooks. I mentioned these earlier on. There is also a link here, a very specifically Welcome to Excel which gives you a tour of Excel 2013. So whether or not you’ve used Excel before, I suggest you take a little bit of time out to try that. The very first option here is Blank Workbook and you’ll very often start with a blank workbook. If you know what you want to do and you don’t need a template of some sort that’s a good starting point. In the top right hand corner we have some very important little buttons up here. The three on the right, the X is Close as you’d expect in a Windows application. We have a Maximize button to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 maximize the window, a Minimize button to minimize the window, and, of course, if it was maximized we’d have a Restore button to put it back to the last sized size which was not max or min. And then very importantly with the question mark here, and bear in mind I mentioned this earlier, if you’re using a touch device and you don’t have an F1 key, for example, to bring up Help, if you’ve started Excel 2013 by either double clicking a shortcut on your desktop or you’ve tapped from the Start Screen, you tap that question mark to bring up Help. And from there you can get through to the touch options as I mentioned before. So let me just quickly touch that. Now it’s important to realize here that with Excel 2013 we’re dealing with online Help here. So if you’re not connected to the internet, you won’t see this online Help. There are other Help options available and we’ll take a look at that a little bit later on in the course. But if you’ve got an internet connection, you can get to online Help, you can get the word Touch in there, and then you can do that search and you can find out all about those touch gestures that I mentioned before. When you finish looking at Help, at the moment if you click on the Close button up here and that takes you back into Excel 2013 again. So the first thing I’d like to do is to open one of the Sample Workbooks that’s included with the course material. As I mentioned earlier on, you should have a folder that you can find easily where you can access these files. I’ve got mine in a folder. I’ve also got a shortcut to that folder. If you click on Open Other Workbooks here, this brings up a screen where we can choose from basically four options. We have Opening from Recent Workbooks. So when we’ve got a Recent Workbooks list, it’ll be down there and we can choose one of the ones that we’ve opened recently. We can choose from my SkyDrive. I actually have a SkyDrive account setup with some files in it. I’m going to show you how to setup your own SkyDrive later on. These are basically workbooks that are saved on Microsoft’s infrastructure and that I can reach from basically anywhere in the world. Computer refers to my computer. It’ll also include access to a network if I’m attached to a network. And then I can also add another place here somewhere else that I would like to be able to access my Excel workbooks from. So I’m going to choose Computer on this occasion and as you can see here on the list of recent folders, so this is folders on my computer that I’ve accessed recently, there is actually a shortcut to the folder where I’ve put all those exercise files. Now obviously I could use that now, but I want to use Browse to show you what it’s like to use the first time. So if I click on Browse, it © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 takes me into an open dialog for My Computer and I know that on my desktop I’ve got a shortcut to where the sample files are. So let me just double click on the shortcut and there are those sample files. Now that’s the first one. I’m going to open that one. Of course, I can open it either by clicking and then clicking Open or in fact by tapping to select it and then tapping the Open button. Now when we opened the file and you’ll see the name of that file right at the top of the Window here, ssi-excel2013-example-01.xlsx, that file is referred to as a workbook. And I’ve used the term workbook quite a bit already on this course. It’s basically a file and within that file, you can have one or more spreadsheets, what we call in Excel worksheets.

Worksheet and

spreadsheet basically mean the same thing. Now if you look right at the bottom of the window here, you’ll see Sheet 1. And this particular workbook has got three sheets in it: Sheet 1, Sheet 2, Sheet 3. Each of them is a spreadsheet. Each of them is a worksheet. But they’re all in the same workbook. Now when you’re working with Excel, you will very often to do a particular job need one workbook. And quite often within that workbook, you’ll only need one worksheet. And really how many workbooks and how many worksheets in those workbooks you need just depend on the job. Now in this case, if I want to look at what’s on Sheet 2, I click it to select it and as you can see within this grid here, which I’ll talk about later on, there’s nothing. To select Sheet 3, I’ll do exactly the same thing or indeed I can tap, that selects it, and you can see that there’s nothing on that one either. So let me just tap Sheet 1 again. Now from now on whenever I’m just single clicking, just take it that single click and single tap are the same thing. So I’ll say click it and that will be the same as saying tap it. Similarly when I say double click something that’s the same as saying double tap something. So I’m not going to keep repeating tap equivalent to click. So we’re now looking again at Sheet 1 in this workbook. And on Sheet 1 we actually have some data. You will see the horizontal rows and vertical columns here, and at each intersection of a row and a column you have one of these little shapes. These are called cells. So each of these cells, if I click in it or tap obviously, I click in it, that’s one cell in a Worksheet. And with each cell, it’s in a column and it’s in a row. Now look at the cell that I’ve got selected here. The column is F; the row is 4. We call this cell the cell F4. Several of the cells on this sheet have © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 some content. So for instance, C3 says 5 p.m., B6 says 8 a.m., A9 says Sunday. And later on in the course we’re going to start to look at what this data means, how to change it, how to put data in, and so on. But for the moment, just note that some of the cells have got content. Also note that some of the cells like this one seem to be much bigger than all the others. It’s actually sort of three cells stuck together and that’s what we call a merged cell, and we’ll talk about merging cells later as well. But for the moment having had a look at these first sample workbooks, what we’re going to do now is to close it. So when you want to work on a workbook you open it, you do the work you’re going to do, and then you close it. Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, you may have more than one workbook open at a time. But certainly in the early stage of the course we’ll tend to only have one open at a time. So when we finish working on it we close it. And this introduces us to another very important concept in Excel 2013. In fact, it’s pretty much universal throughout Office 2013, and that’s access to something called Backstage View. Now to access Backstage View, you use this special button near the top left corner, it’s File, and if I click on File that takes me into Backstage View. Now Backstage View is basically where you do all the admin and maintenance side of workbooks. It’s where you do everything to a workbook that you don’t actually do in the book itself. So from here you can do things like create a new workbook, open a workbook, save a workbook, print it, share it, and in this case close it. So on this occasion, all I’m going to do is to close that workbook. So, click on Close and the workbook closes. And one thing you’ll notice is that Excel 2013 now seems to be completely empty in that there’s nothing at all there. There’s no spreadsheet there. There are no rows. There are no cells. There’s nothing. So there we are. When I finished working with Excel 2013 what I then will do is to close Excel 2013 itself. Of course, I could at this point open another workbook, but I want to show you what’s happened as a consequence of what we’ve just done. So I’m just going to close Excel and then in the next section we’re going to start it up again and after having another look at what happens when we open Excel 2013 we’re going to create a new workbook. So please join me in the next section. Let’s close it. That’s it.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Templates; Creating, Opening, and Saving a Workbook Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to open Excel again, take another look at the introductory screen, and then we’re going to create a new workbook. So once again I’m using the keyboard shortcut on my desktop in Windows 8, double click on that, Excel opens, and now you can see that on the recent files list the workbook that I opened during the previous section is now in the list. And as I work on further workbooks, I’ll find that they’re names appear in this recent files list here. So let’s suppose now that we want to create a new workbook. We can start from the same place and we can choose Blank Workbook. I’ll come back to Blank Workbook in just a moment. Let’s have a quick look at some of the templates first. If you scroll down and, of course, to scroll down if you’re using a touch screen, you can just scroll with your finger in the usual way. If you go down and look at the available templates, for instance, here’s one Generic Family Budget. If I tap on Generic Family Budget, what happens is the template details are downloaded from Microsoft. You can look at the description of what this template is and there will normally be a rating as well so other people who’ve tried this template will rate and in terms of what they thought of it on the basis of various factors. If you like the look of it and you want to give it a try, you click on Create and the template itself will be downloaded from Microsoft. So let’s try this one. Let’s click on Create. It’s downloaded and then when it’s available it opens. And as you can see you’ve got a graphical kind of representation of a family’s budget. You can see how the money, the money spent by the family is split up here. There are some summarizing totals over here: Income $4,000, Expenses $5,933, a Cash Flow. Well, they’ve overspent in March. So you may wonder well where all these numbers are. Well this page, this worksheet, note the tab down there is really a dashboard. That means it’s a summary of some other information. The second spreadsheet, the second worksheet is labeled Budget. And if I click on Budget, I can see where all of the various money entries are. And there’s quite a bit of information in there. Note that there is a scrollbar on the right that I can use to scroll up and down. And there’s also a scrollbar at the bottom that lets me scroll left and right. Now, of course, you can do both of these things if you’re using a touch device just by using the touch device to scroll in the usual way.


Learn Excel 2013 And then finally there’s another worksheet, a setup worksheet, which actually establishes the categories. So for instance, it says that under Daily Living, there’s a column here, the categories in Daily Living are Groceries, Personal Supplies, Clothing, Cleaning Services, etc. Now the general idea of these templates is that somebody has gone to the trouble of creating the mechanism to make this thing work. And you could take this, maybe adapt the categories to your own requirements, and once you’ve put your figures in there, you should find that the dashboard will give you a good representation of your family’s budget over the same period. Now, of course, you won’t have the same figures as this other family, the Johnson family, and you probably won’t have the same categories. You may want to summarize the thing in a different way. But this is a really excellent way of getting you started on setting up a workbook to perform a useful function, in this case in your home life. And what’s more even though this is intended to be used for a family budget, family cash flow, it will be very easy to adapt this to the performance of a small business for example. Now it’s true to say that many of the templates that are provided are for a beginner quite complex and in order to use a template like this, you’re going to need to know quite a bit more about Excel. So I’m going to steer clear of these templates for the moment. We’ll come back and look at one or two of the details later on. We’re going to start off with some of the real basics here in terms of understanding how to enter and edit data, for example. So I’m going to close this one. I hope you can remember how to do that. Click on File to go into Backstage View, Close.

Now note in this case that Microsoft Excel thinks we may have created a

workbook here and that we may have put material in it that we want to save. So it says, Do you want to save your changes? Now what I’ve done there really is to move around and show you a couple of things. We haven’t actually made any changes. And even if we had I don’t want to save them. So I’m just going to click on Don’t Save. That means that this particular workbook will be closed but it will not be saved on my computer. So click or tap Don’t Save and we’re back to the empty Excel again. Now we really are going to create a new blank workbook. Now one way of doing that if we go back into Backstage View and click on New, we see that same list. It’s slightly differently arranged now because we’ve got a bit more space on the screen. But on this occasion, I’m going to choose Blank Workbook. Now when you choose Blank Workbook that’s exactly what you © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 get. You get a Workbook. It has a default name normally of Book 1. If you’ve been working in Excel for a while, created and worked on a few workbooks during one session, a new one might say Book 2 or Book 3 or Book 4. But we’re just starting fresh here so it’s Book 1. And note there’s one worksheet down here and by Default it’s called Sheet 1. So there’s our empty workbook to work with. Now in terms of putting some numbers on these workbooks in a couple of sections time, we’re going to devote most of a section to entering and editing data and all the different types of data we might put in, in Excel. What I really want to show you now at the end of this section is how to save a workbook. So all I want to do is put some numbers in this worksheet. It really doesn’t matter what numbers you put in there as long as you put in at least one. Now at the moment when you’ve got a new workbook open, you’ll find normally Cell A, that’s Column A, 1 that’s Row 1. A1 will have a border around it with a little sort of square thing in the corner. I’ll tell you about all this a little bit later on. But that is the currently selected cell. That’s what we call the selection. And if on your keyboard you just type a two or anything else for that matter. You could put an A or a Z or a B or anything you like. You will find that will appear in that first cell. Now you may not want to do anything more than that at the moment. I’m going to go to B1. Just by clicking in it that moves the selection to B1. I’m going to put a different number in there. C1, well that’ll do me for now. Notice that as you move to the next cell, look at the four in C1, it’s on the left of the cell. As I click to the next one you’ll see it moves over to the right. Now I’ll explain all that to you later on because it’s quite a lot going on there and it’s important to understand some of that. But that’s all you need to do. Just put some numbers or letters somewhere on this worksheet and then we’re going to close the worksheet but we’re going to save it. Now you could just do File, Close. And then when Excel 2013 says to you “Do you want to save it?” You could say Yes. But we’re going to do this the professional way and we’re going to say File and we’re going to do Save As. Now Save As means I’ve not saved this before so I’ve got to tell you what it’s called. So I’m going to do File, Save As. Now I get the choice do I want to save to SkyDrive, somewhere on my computer? Do I want to add a place? I’ll go for computer. There’s that last folder we used with the examples and let’s use that folder. Let’s go in there. Let’s start putting our own workbooks in there. Now it’s an Excel workbook so it’s extension is © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 .xlsx. But the file name I’m going to call Toby, that’s my name, hyphen. You can call these what you like. But if you use my sort of naming standard, you’ll be able to follow more clearly what we’re doing. I’m going to call it toby-test-exercise-01. So I’m thinking of these as my test exercises I’m going through the course. So toby-test-exercise-01. I’m going to put it in the same folder as the examples that come on the course. Click on the Save button. And that is now saved as a workbook with that name and note at the top of the Excel 2013 window you can see the file Name just to remind you what it’s called. So use your own naming system. Try to be consistent. But you’ll find them then in the same place as the other files. You could, of course, put these somewhere completely different on your computer if you want to. If you prefer to put them on a different drive in a different folder it’s entirely up to you, as long as you remember where you’ve put them. And then what I’m now going to do is to close this particular workbook. So that’s easy enough. Just go to Backstage View, click on Close. Of course, I’ve just saved it so it won’t say to me, “Do you want to save any changes?” because I’ve just saved the changes.

So it closes

immediately and I’m left with empty Excel again. So let’s see in this particular section we’ve opened an existing workbook and closed it again, we’ve looked at a template, we’ve created a new workbook from scratch, saved it with a file name, closed it, and we’ve once again opened and exited Excel all in the same section. So it’s been a pretty busy section this one. You probably owe yourself a little bit of a break. In the next section, we’re going to look at Help so please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 4 – Help Video: Online, Offline, and Contextual Help Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m going to look at Help. And we’ve already seen Help a little bit earlier on when I pointed out that you can access Help by pressing the F1 key. Generally speaking in Excel 2013, to access Help if you look at the top right hand corner of the Window you’re working in there will almost always be a little question mark sign. And if you click on the question mark sign, you’ll see the Excel Help. So let’s click on this one and see what the Help looks like. Now the page that you see here is what’s usually referred to as the Excel Help Home Page. And from here you have access to Help in a number of ways. The icons that you see here are actually very useful for a start because they give you links through to very useful, very popular and commonly used Help topics. So there’s “See what’s new” which will take you through the “What’s new for Excel 2013”. So if I click on that one, you’ll see information that we saw earlier about what’s new. We also have help in terms of keyboard shortcuts. So this will take you through an explanation of the keyboard shortcuts in Excel 2013 and a very detailed list of them. And the other links here include getting access to free training, learning Excel basics, using the Excel web App, and then tips for using tablets. So this has got a lot of the touch screen information on it and so on. Above that you have some of the most popular search topics. So, Microsoft accumulates information about what subjects people search for and these are some of the most commonly used ones. And then we have a More button here that can take us through to more Help topics. Now when you’re using Help, you’re quite often going to be looking for a particular thing. And so the basis of Help in Excel 2013 is that you’re going to use the search facility to find the term that you want to find some help on. So let me just put a term in here. I’m going to put in the term Touch and then in order to find help on touch you can either just press the Enter key or click on the little magnifying glass icon there. Click on that and you get links to a number of articles about touch. Now the ones that are links you’ll see as you hover over them you’ll see they’re underlined, the color changes, and they become active links to the Excel Help system. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So if I move down the page here, there’s another one, find and start Office applications, use Windows 8 Narrator, view what’s new in Excel 2013; some of the topics that we’ve talked about already actually. And if I go to Office Touch Guide that takes me to the document that I talked about in an earlier section. Now one of the important things about using Help in Excel 2013, in fact in all of Office 2013, is that it’s a browser-based system; so you have Back and Forward buttons as here. So if I want to go back to the previous page I click the Back button. And if I want to go forward again I press the Forward button. And there’s also a Home button to take me back to the Excel Help Home. And then there’s a Print button. There’s also a button here, the one with the capital A, which enables me to get the help in a larger text size. That’s for people who with some sort of visual impairment or working in a situation where it’s difficult to read the Help at its default font size. So that’s a Toggle. You can switch it back to the regular size like that. So that’s the basics of finding your way around Excel 2013 Help. Now as with most Help systems from most of the major software manufacturers nowadays there is a very heavy reliance on being online, having an internet connection, in order for this help to work. There is offline help. It’s actually very restricted in Excel 2013. But if you’re not connected to the internet, it can help you. And if you look to the right of the words Excel Help up here, there’s a little drop down there. If you click on that drop down, it gives you a choice between Excel Help from Office.com and Excel Help from your computer. If you want to look at the offline help, and I’m going to leave you to do this for yourself, you check this and you’ll see the offline help, the help that’s actually on your computer and for which you don’t need an internet connection. It is really quite restricted though. It gives you help along the lines of where to find things on the Ribbon. We’re going to talk about the Ribbon in a little while. And it doesn’t really tell you very much, nothing in the level of detail of most of the help that we’ve seen already. The other thing is if you don’t have an internet connection this becomes the default for Help. So generally speaking, you’re only going to get comprehensive help if you have an internet connection and then you need to have that option set, Excel Help from Office.com, which is the default. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So the little question mark symbol is the symbol for accessing Help. You’ll see it all over the place in Excel 2013. Just one other thing. There’s a little icon like a push pin on the right here. If I hover over it, I see that it says, Keep Help on top. If you want to keep Help available so that you can perhaps work through an example or follow the Help in detail, if you click that push pin, then no matter what other Windows you’ve got open, it will keep that one on top. It helps you to read instructions or directions or whatever else you’re following. If you click that so that the Help is on top, now if I hover over the same icon it says, Don’t keep Help on top. So that’s another thing that’s got a toggle. And with many of these tips, screen tips or tool tips as they’re sometimes called, you’ll also see apart from it saying Don’t keep Help on top you’ll see the keyboard shortcut is Control-T which toggles between Help being on top and Help taking its chances with all the other Windows in terms of what you can see on your desktop. So that’s something else that you might occasionally find useful with Help. Now you should note that the Help Window is a separate window from Excel itself. So when you finished using Help, although you could minimize it if you wanted to, you can also just close it. So I use the Close button in the top right hand corner of the screen, close Help, and I’m back at the regular Excel Window. Now there’s just one other thing I’d quickly like to show you about this. If I open one of the worksheets I’ve been working on, so let me go into Backstage View and choose Recent Workbook. It doesn’t matter which one. On the Ribbon and we’re going to talk about the Ribbon a bit later on, but there are various commands that bring up dialog. And dialogs you’ll be very used to if you’ve used other Windows applications. They have OK buttons and Cancel buttons. In past times and in particular with Microsoft software, there always used to be OK, Cancel, and Help. And you’re going to see all over the place we can see dozens of these dialogs in Excel, the Help button that was there for many, many years has now effectively been totally replaced by the little question mark here at the top right hand corner of a dialog. That’s pretty much a standard in Office 2013. So if you’re wondering where that old Help buttons have gone, this is the little question mark, this is pretty much it now in Office 2013. So that’s it on Help for the moment. Obviously, we’re going to be using the Help from time to time on the course. I’ll see you in the next section. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 5 – Settings and Preferences Video: Excel Options Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Excel Options which is probably the most important aspect of Microsoft Excel, certainly in terms of setting up to suite the way that you work and to suite your own installation. If you’re new to Excel there’s what may seem like a baffling array of options that you make decisions about. But in fact with Excel Options, provided you’ve got one or two of the simplest ones in place first and I’m going to point those out to you now. Then, the others you can deal with as you come to them and during the rest of the course I’ll refer you back to Excel Options. So first of all, let’s look at how we access the Excel Options. Well let’s go into Backstage View and in Backstage View right down at the bottom, Options. Now the Excel Options is really a big dialog box and you should know by now that if you want some help at any point, you’ve got the link through here, the question mark that takes you through to Help. And the dialog box is arranged into a set of Pages. So we have a General Page, we have a Formulas Page, Proofing, Save, Languages, and so on. Now some of these I’m going to talk about later on in the course, but I want to talk about a few of the main straightforward settings to get you started. And let’s go back to the General Page first. Now three-quarters of the way down that page there’s a section marked “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” and in there you should have your own user name. This user name will be used to annotate the workbooks that you create. And it can be used in a number of other situations to do with making changes to workbooks and so on. But either put your own name or a sort of code name or something in there. And the other thing you can do here, I’m not going to go into this in detail now but you might like to look into it, is that you can choose the Office Theme and Office Background that you want to use. Now these basically relate to a common approach, a common Theme throughout your use of many of the Office 2013 components. I’ve got mine set here at the defaults. Now when we talked about Help earlier on, I didn’t really talk about what are called screen tips. Let me hover over one of the rows in the first section on the General Page of the Excel Options © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 and what pops up there is what’s called a screen tip. It says “Show mini toolbar on selection.” That’s Bold. That’s the tip. And then below that the other text is referred to as a deature description. Now this can be very useful to have these screen tips and feature descriptions appearing whenever you’re using Excel, particularly when you’re new to Excel it will tell you what a particular command, what a particular button does, and then also give it a little bit more of a detailed description of what it does. Now after you’ve been using Excel for a while, you may not need those screen tips and this first section on the General Page let’s you switch them off or partially off. If you look at this drop down it says, Screen Tip Style. Show feature descriptions in screen tips. That’s the sort of full on version of screen tips. If you said I don’t want the feature descriptions, you’ll only get the tip, the title if you like. And if you select don’t show screen tips, you won’t get anything at all. Now I’m going to choose the middle option, so don’t show feature descriptions. Any changes you make in Excel Options only actually get executed when you click the OK. So let’s click on OK. I’ve got a little workbook open here. Let me hover over the command here. It says Bold. It only says Bold. It tells me what that command is. It’s the command to make text Bold. Let me go into Backstage View again, back into the Options, the General Page. Now let me go back to the original setting; Show feature descriptions in screen tips. Click on OK again, hover that same button. Now it says Bold and the rather helpful text, Make your text bold. Now in this case perhaps that’s not a particularly helpful feature description, but sometimes the feature descriptions are quite detailed and can really help explain how something works or what it does in a little bit more detail. So let’s go back into the Options again and I’m going to leave it at Show feature descriptions in screen tips. When you’ve been using Excel for a while, you may find that you don’t need the feature descriptions. You may find that you don’t need the screen tips at all. So this is how you switch them off. So I want to talk now about this section, the second section that says “When creating new workbooks.” You may be familiar with the concept of themes in Microsoft Office or maybe Microsoft Excel and we’re going to talk about themes later on. But with the theme that is applied to new workbooks, there will be a default body font and at the moment, the default font for new Excel workbooks is whatever that body font is in the selected theme. The font size is set to 11. So that means that when I create a new workbook, the workbook will have as its font the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 body font for the theme that’s in use and the font size will be 11. If I would always like the font to be something different, then I can use the drop down here to choose a different font from the theme such as the headings font or a specific font. Now the list of fonts on this machine is, there are hundreds of them now and nowadays on a modern PC the number of fonts is getting to be absolutely huge. It’s very difficult to choose between them there are so many. But most people tend to finish up using a relatively small number of fonts. So familiar fonts, things like Calibri and Times and so on will appear quite a lot. I’m going to leave this one set at Body Font so that it matches the theme that’s in use. Another important option here is the default view, Normal View. We’ll talk about that later. And then we also have “Include this many sheets.” For a very long time when you created a new workbook in Microsoft Excel, the convention was to create three new sheets and that continued right up to the 2010 version. In this new version, the default is just to create one sheet in a workbook when you create a new workbook. I leave mine set at one because I find that usually for most of the day to day work that I do in Excel I do only need one worksheet. Although in many cases the number of worksheets can really become quite big. And I have worked on workbooks with literally dozens of worksheets in them. So, you should set your defaults there to what suites you. It may well be that to get started it’s best to leave them just as they are. And one other useful little setting on the General Page right at the bottom, “Show the Start Screen when this application starts.” The Start Screen is the one that we’ve always seen so far, the one with the template images on it and so on, with the Recent list on the left. If you want to go straight into Excel without that uncheck this box, click on OK to save the change, and next time you start Excel you won’t see that Start Screen. Now I’m going to come back to the Formulas Page and the Proofing Page later. Let’s go to the Save Page and there’s one particular setting on here that I’d like to point out to you. When you’re saving workbooks, it’s usually a bit of a struggle to find exactly where you’re going to put it. We’re going to use SkyDrive later, but for the moment we’re mostly going to be using your computer. You can say to Excel using this option roughly in the middle of this Page what’s the default local file location to save workbooks to. Now on a Windows PC, this is Windows 8 remember, the default locations tend to be your Documents folder within your user area on the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 C: Drive. So in my case that location is C:, Users, TobyA, Documents. You can set that to anything you like really, provided you have access to it. So if you set that here, then you’re going to find that every time you come to save a new workbook it’ll go straight to that folder, it’ll probably save you a little bit of hunting around. So that’s a useful thing to set as well. And just above that there’s a checkbox that says “Save to computer by default.” So by default it will come up with offering to save a workbook, a new workbook, to your computer which again can save you a little bit of scrambling around. For instance, if you’re not planning to use SkyDrive and you almost always save to your computer that’s a good option to set as well. So now let’s move to the next page. Again, very important and this is Language. Now depending on your locale, you’ll have the Language set here accordingly. My default Language is English United Kingdom and I probably, in a typical working week, do roughly half and half English UK and English U.S. I don’t routinely work in any other languages, so I only have those two setup. Most people will only have one language setup and to some extent people would say, well, what’s the difference between English UK and English U.S.? Well believe me there’s quite a big difference. But you will normally have just your default language setup and if you use another one it’s pretty easy to add another additional language there. If you look at the drop down below this main box here the list of languages is extremely long. And those languages are supported very well in Excel. So basically make sure you have the right language set and if there’s more than one language, make sure you’ve got the correct language set as your default. It’s quite straightforward to change the default. If for instance I clicked on here to English United States, I could use a button at the right to set that as my default language. Similarly if I wanted to remove that language, there’s a Remove button on the right. So there are a few more pages and we’re going to come back to these a little bit later on. In the next section, we’re going to be looking at the Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar. So I’ll come back to those in a while. The Advanced Options, some of those will be coming back to later on as well. And then we have a page on add-ins which really caters for additional facilities that you can install. And then also in terms of protection and security, we have a Trust Center Page that we’ll also look at later. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So we’ve looked at the most important Excel Options for now. I hope they make some sense. You need to go through the pages that I’ve highlighted and make sure that you’ve got them set correctly on your installation of Excel and I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 6 – The Ribbon and Toolbars Video: Ribbon Interface Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. If you’ve used Office 2007 products or Office 2010 products, you’ll be familiar with the Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar. For the different constituent programs within Office, the migration from the old Menu system to the Ribbon based system has preceded at a sort of variable pace. Some of them have completed the transition before the others. But by the time we get to 2013, it’s pretty much complete. And in Windows 8, the Ribbon is starting to make an appearance. If you’re using Windows 8, you will have seen the program that was called Windows Explorer that’s now called File Explorer has a Ribbon interface as well. So, pretty much the Ribbon is here to stay. Not everybody likes it. Some people still prefer the old Menu system. But I think more people like it now than did originally and one of the good things about the Ribbon Interface is it is pretty highly customizable and if you do particularly repetitive work or if you focus on just a few commands within a product like Excel, so you don’t need the vast array of different options that are available, then the ability to customize the Interface can really pay off. So if you’ve not used the Ribbon before or you’re a little bit cagey about using it and you think, well, I’d really prefer the old Menu system. Give the Ribbon a chance because I think that if you use it for a while it will grow on you. The Ribbon is this sort of rectangle here and part of the Ribbon, or just above it if you like, you have these words like View, Review, Data, Formulas, and so on. Now these correspond to tabs and at any one time with the Ribbon, you have a selected tab. Now omit the word File from this, that file white on a green background. That’s the access to Backstage View, which we’ve used already. We’re talking about the word Home onwards and at the moment you see that Home has got this sort of three-quarters of a rectangle round it. The Home tab is selected. If I click on the word Insert, the Insert tab will be selected. Page Layout and so on. So they are the tabs of the Ribbon and at any time in Excel which tabs you can see will vary. Now the tabs you see now will be there pretty much all of the time. It’s more that you get additional tabs sometimes. And you’ll see some of those later on in the course.


Learn Excel 2013 The Home tab, as the name implies, that’s the one which we sort of regard as Home. And when the Home tab is selected you can see a number of groups. Now the groups have names and the groups are the words at the bottom. So that’s the Clipboard Group. That’s the Font Group. And a group, the groups are separated by these vertical faint dividing lines. So there’s a Clipboard Group, then there’s a dividing line, then there’s the Font Group, then another line, Alignment Group, another one, Number, and so on. So on each of the tabs there are a number of groups and as you will see each tab has different groups. Now within a group there are individual commands. So for instance, on the Insert tab, in the Tables Group, Pivot Table Command, a recommended Pivot Tables Command, and a Table Command. Now note as I hover over those, I’m getting those screen tips that we talked about earlier. They’ll tell you a little bit about what each of those commands does. Many of the commands on many of the tabs we’re going to be covering on the course; so I’m not too worried at the moment about exactly a command does. I just want to show you the principle that you’ve got tabs, within tabs you’ve got groups, within groups you’ve got commands. Now the next thing I want to point out about the Ribbon is that the commands are in effect context sensitive. And at the moment, you should be able to see that really all of the commands on this Ribbon, all of the commands in all of the groups on the Insert tab are grayed out. You couldn’t actually execute any of them at the moment and the reason is that we don’t have a workbook open. Let’s go to the Home tab. On the Home tab, same thing, everything is grayed out. So let’s open that first Sample Workbook, the one that we looked at earlier on. Once that’s open then virtually every command is now enabled. One or two aren’t. There’s one on the left, Paste, that’s grayed out. You couldn’t paste something. But virtually everything else is. Go to the Insert tab, most of that. You notice how the commands take on their color, they get bolder; they get sharper. You can see them. As you hover over them, they highlight, you get the screen tips. You could use those commands once you’ve got a workbook open. So the ability to use a command is largely dependent on whether that command can be used in a specific situation. Now that doesn’t only depend on whether you have a workbook open. It can depend on other things as well. And we’ll come back to that aspect of using the Ribbon as well a little bit later on.


Learn Excel 2013 So, we have the Ribbon. We have tabs on the Ribbon. Within the tabs we have command groups and within the groups we have commands. The commands themselves vary. They all do different things, but they also have different natures. Some of them, let’s take the Table Command here for example; if I click on Table what I get is a little dialog inviting me to create a table. We’ll look at that later on, but that’s a pretty straightforward command. If on the other hand I go to this one, Pivot Chart, which is in the Charts Group. There are two parts to this; there’s a top part and a bottom part. And in fact they both have the same screen tip which is a bit confusing. But one of the notable differences and you’ll see this quite a bit, is that the bottom one has a little arrow. When you’ve got a little arrow, a little sort of chevron like that, that means there’s going to be a choice. So if I click on that, click on the drop down I’m given a choice of a pivot chart or a pivot chart and pivot table. I can choose either of those. Let me just click away. If I click on the top part which doesn’t have the arrow, I just get in this case a pivot chart. So there’s no choice for me to make there; that just makes that thing happen straightaway. That’s quite a common feature. So let’s look at another example over here on the right text. If I click on the drop down under Text, I have a number of options. Some of them have gone off the edge of the screen actually, but you can see a number of different options that I can choose from. Now different commands will have different numbers of options or none at all, and the way they work varies as well. So here I am back on the Home tab. One of the commands in the Font Group is the Font Size Command and it’s actually a drop down list. If I click on the arrow next to 11 which is the current font size, the default in this case is Calibri 11 point. I can choose from one of the available font sizes. So if I wanted to change to 12 select 12; that is now the font size. If I want to, I can also edit in situ. I don’t have to choose one from the available sizes. So if I wanted say 13 point, I could just type 13 even though it’s not on the available list. Now in some cases, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that. In this case, I am. So you have a choice there between choosing from the drop down list or putting in a value of your own. Now amongst the other options, amongst the other command types that you’ve got here, again we’ve got various drop downs and so on, but most of these groups and certainly most of the ones on the Home tab have a little symbol in the bottom right hand corner of the group. You can probably just about see it there. And that’s what’s called a Dialog Box Launcher. And if we © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 take Font, for example, the Font Group, if I click on the Dialog Box Launcher, it brings up a dialog. Now the dialog is the Format Cells dialog that we’ll be looking at later on. But within that dialog, there is a specific tab selected and that is the Font tab. And basically with this we can go through and select Font, Style, Size, Color, whether we have Underline, various other options rather than using the individual commands in the Font Group on the Ribbon we can use the more conventional dialog approach. And some people prefer to use the dialog than taking the individual commands one at a time in the Font Group. So if you know exactly what you want to do but you’ve got to change four or five things to do it sometimes using the dialog will give you a quicker result. Now one disadvantage of the Ribbon is that it does take up quite a bit of space on the screen. But you can control this is a couple of ways. When you’ve been using the Ribbon for a while, you’ll find that you tend to remember where the commands are and therefore if you wanted to do a particular thing on a spreadsheet, you may know that in order say to make a particular cell bold or to add up a column of figures, you need to go to a particular place on the Ribbon. It may be then that you only need to be able to see the tab names to select the tab that you want. Now if you look at the top right hand corner of the Excel workspace, you’ve got the Close, Maximize, Minimize buttons. You’ve got the question mark symbol there to go to Help and in between there’s another symbol, Ribbon Display Options. If you click on Ribbon Display Options, you have the three options for the Ribbon Display. There’s Show tabs and Commands which is basically where it is now. You can see the tabs, you can see the commands. There’s Show tabs and then there’s Auto-Hide Ribbon. Now let’s, first of all, look at Show Tabs. Now if you select Show Tabs, what happens you now only see the names of the tabs. You don’t see the commands at all. Now you may see a bit of a problem there and you think, well, how am I going to use the dommands if I can’t see them? And the point is that when you click on a tab, the Ribbon appears, you use it for a period of time and then it disappears again. So, let’s suppose I select that cell there, F7. I type something into it. Let’s say I type the word Hello and I want to make that bold. I know that to make it bold I need to go to the Home tab. So click on Home, click on bold to make the content of that bold, and then as soon as I finished on that cell I’ve gone somewhere else, the Ribbon disappears again. Now I can always bring it back by clicking


Learn Excel 2013 on a tab. Most of the time that I’m working the Ribbon is not in view and I just bring it into view when I need to use a Command. Now the other option you can choose here, of course, is Auto-Hide Ribbon. I’ll leave you to try this one yourself, but basically with Auto-Hide Ribbon, you hide the Ribbon and the tabs. And in order to see them again, all you do is click at the very top of the application. So at the top of the visible Window, click there and the tabs and the Ribbon will reappear. This is very useful when you’ve got a large area of worksheet to work on and you don’t particularly need to access any of the commands on the Ribbon for a while. You can give yourself pretty much the maximum amount of space to work with. Now, one of the features of the Ribbon that’s new in Excel 2013, although it may not be that obvious to you, particularly if you’ve not used it before, is that many of the commands have been spaced out a little bit more and arranged a little bit more carefully to allow access on touch devices. So, people who have fairly fat fingers like me will find that they can access the commands more easily if they’re using a touch screen. One other aspect of using the Ribbon when you have so many commands on it, of course, is if you actually prefer to use the keyboard or if you’re limited to using a keyboard. Now there’s a facility with the Ribbon called key tips you can use which will help you if you need those shortcuts. And all you need to do on a conventional keyboard, if you’re going to use the keyboard I’m assuming you’ve got a keyboard, so you press the Alt key and what appears are this set of key tips. So you can see them along there. So for example Home, the tab for Home has got an H on it. Insert has got an N, Page Layout has got a P, and so on. And you can use those keyboard shortcuts to access one of the tabs. So for instance if I wanted to access the Data tab, I just press the A key. Now not only does that open up the Data tab but it gives me a similar set of keyboard shortcuts, key tip shortcuts, for all of the commands on that tab. Now, that can be an extremely useful facility for the Ribbon if you are restricted to using the keyboard or if you just prefer to use the keyboard. When you finish with the key tips, you just need to press the Alt key to hide them again. Now there’s just one other thing I’d like to tell you about in relation to the Ribbon and that is I’ve mentioned that you can customize it. Now customizing the Ribbon we won’t have time to cover on this course, but I’m going to quickly show you where you can find the facility to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 customize the Ribbon. There are a couple of places actually, but the easiest way is to go into Options from Backstage View and then one of the options is Customize Ribbon. Now from there, you can pretty much choose any tab on the right including creating a New tab for yourself and including creating new group or groups within a tab. And you can add just about any command that’s available in Excel 2013 and believe me there are a lot of commands you can add to that new tab and that new group. Now there are limits to what you can do to existing tabs and groups but usually the best bet is to create your own tab with your own groups to put the commands that you use the most on it. In the next section, we’re going to talk about Quick Access Toolbar and in there I’m going to show you a little bit about customizing the Quick Access Toolbar. And if you follow that I think you’ll find it enough to come back to this and customize the Ribbon if you want to. But for now that’s it on the Ribbon. We’re going to be using it throughout the course. It’s time to look at the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section, so I’ll see you then.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Quick Access Toolbar Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar which is a toolbar that appears in the top left hand corner of the Excel 2013 window. You can see it up there. At the moment, you can see four or five commands. There’s a command with a picture of a little diskette. If you’re youngish you may not even know what a diskette is, but it’s a very old and primitive device for saving computer files on. There’s that sort of curvy arrow there which is an Undo Command. There’s an arrow that curves the other which is a Redo Command, and then other commands may or may not appear on this Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar by default has a number of commands. The reason it’s there is to put commands that you use a lot such as Undo if you make a good few mistakes like me, right at your fingertips. The Undo button is there all the time. It doesn’t matter which tab on the Ribbon I’ve got selected, although one of them has the Undo Command on it. I’ve always got the Undo Command on my Quick Access Toolbar. It’s one that’s there all the time. In the same I’ve got the Save Command there all the time. So it’s a way of putting a small number of commands at your fingertips. Now depending on your installation of Excel 2013, you may or may not see the same buttons that I see here. But at the right hand end there’s a sort of drop down arrow under a short hyphen character and the screen tip there is Customize Quick Access Toolbar. Click on that and you get this little Menu. Now the Menu says the names of a number of commands, New down to Touch stroke mouse mode. And these are the commands that by default can appear on the QAT, on the Quick Access Toolbar. The ones that are ticked are the ones that appear at the moment. So I’ve got touch mouse mode which is the last one, the picture of the pointing finger up there, then I’ve got a Redo, Undo, and Save. If I wanted also, for instance, to have the Open Command, if I click on Open, I now see I’ve got an Open button there as well. And if I click that Menu again, I’ll see that Open is now ticked. So if I wanted to remove the touch stroke mouse mode command, to remove it click it, it’s no longer there. So that is a very simple type of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar. Another very simple type of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar, again we’ll click on that Menu, the bottom command there “Show below the Ribbon will move the Quick Access


Learn Excel 2013 Toolbar to show below the Ribbon.” Some people prefer to have it there because Quick Access you haven’t got to pass over the Ribbon to get to it, its right above the working space. So let’s select that, the Quick Access Toolbar is now there and it’s mostly readily available to use directly from the worksheet that I’m working on at the time and again straightforward to put it back to show above the Ribbon. Now there is another level of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar and as I mentioned in the previous section this will pretty much explain to you a lot about customizing the Ribbon. But let’s suppose that on the Quick Access Toolbar, you’d like to put a Command that isn’t in this list. Let’s suppose that you want to put a Font Size Command on to the Quick Access Toolbar. It’s not in this list now so how do we add something to it which isn’t this list? Well, if you go to More Commands it takes you into the Excel Options dialog and on to the Quick Access Toolbar page. The Quick Access Toolbar page is the one you use to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. Now if I want to find the Font Size Command, in fact it’s pretty easy because it’s there. But if I wanted to find it there are commands in various categories. The popular commands are shown by Default. But there are various other categories of command, commands that are not on the Ribbon, All Commands, Macro Commands, Commands from the Home tab, the Insert tab, and if you want to put a particular command on there and as I’ve said already there are quite a few to choose from, go to the tab or the category where you believe that command is and you should be able to find it.

Now I’ve already seen the Font Size Command under Popular

Commands. So if I click on Popular Commands and then select Font Size and then click on Add, that will now appear in the Quick Access Toolbar. The other point about the Quick Access Toolbar is that you can make a specific version for specific situations. So for instance, you could setup a Quick Access Toolbar specifically for use with this document. And if you had a document that’s maybe very particularly complicated or some unusual commands or maybe one that you use a lot and you’d like to have all the commands that you use on it at your fingertips, you can make a specific Quick Access Toolbar for a document. For the moment I’m going to assume that I’m customizing the Quick Access Toolbar for all documents, which is the default. Click on OK and what I’ve now got added to my Quick Access Toolbar is a Font Size Command. And then, of course, all I have to do to remove that command again is to go back into the Customization. So click on More Commands, back into the Excel Options, select Font


Learn Excel 2013 Size in the list on the right in the Excel Options dialog on the Quick Access Toolbar page, that’s that one, and then this Remove button becomes activated. Click on Remove and it’s gone. Note that within this dialog I can also change the order of the buttons. So if I also wanted to say move the touch mouse mode button up a little, I could select it and it would change its position in the list. Click on OK, back to my Quick Access Toolbar, the font size has disappeared and the touch stroke mouse mode button is moved to a different position. So that’s really all I need to show you on the Quick Access Toolbar for now. But I do want to show you one other thing related to that and we’ve used this touch mouse mode button a couple of times to demonstrate the Quick Access Toolbar. Let me just show you what that button does because it’s actually quite important. I mentioned what it does earlier on and that is that with Excel 2013, it’s been made much easier to use touch and one of the jobs that’s been done in Excel 2013 is to rearrange the Ribbon and the groups and the buttons not so much in the order which is pretty much as it was in 2010, but the way it’s been reengineered is that you can push a button, in fact the touch stroke mouse mode button, to give yourself a bit more space for those fat fingers. So at the moment I’m actually in mouse mode. Watch what happens if I push that button.

Go into touch mode which is the lower mode and there you are.

The Ribbon,

everything’s spaced out even more. Now, of course, that means the Ribbons using even more of your available space. But if you’re using a touch device and you can’t get by with your fingers on the space that’s available to you in the standard mode, then if you go into touch mode everything is spaced out even more and you should find it all quite a bit easier. Now in the final section in this little group I’m going to look at one other toolbar and that’s the Mini toolbar. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Mini Toolbar Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this very short section, we’re going to look at the Mini Toolbar. Now as you may have noticed already and you’ll certainly know about this if you’ve used earlier versions of Excel or in fact just about any relatively recent version of one of the Office products that you can right click on something and you get a contextual menu. Here’s a typical contextual menu just by right clicking on that cell in that worksheet. Maybe the sort of thing you’ve seen many times before. What you may not have seen is the thing above it which is what we call in Excel 2013 the mini toolbar and it generally appears when you’re dealing with anything where you can enter text, numbers, etc. And it gives you a way of formatting very quickly without going to either the Ribbon or to specific commands on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now the mini toolbar not everybody likes to use. I do tend to use it. But for some people it tends to clutter up quite a few things and people can often find it quite difficult to grab exactly the command that they want. But if you are going to use it I’m going to give you a quick demonstration of using it and then I’m going to show you how to enable or disable it. Now the first thing to note about it is that it is context sensitive. So if in this particular cell now H3, I just type the word Hello. If I now sweep over that to select the word Hello, the mini toolbar appears and you see its got quite a restricted set of commands on it. It has commands that let me choose the font and the font size. So I could change the font size quite say to 24 point which would make that word much bigger. I could change the font to, for instance, Adobe Hebrew and I could go Bold and that’s fine. But I’ve only got really quite a restricted set of commands there on that mini toolbar. If I go to an empty cell such as this one and right click as I did earlier on, I get a fuller set of commands and a much bigger mini toolbar. So exactly what it contains and what you can do depends on the context, depends on the situation. So let’s now look at how we can switch the mini toolbar on and off. Obviously, we go into Options and then on the General tab almost the top thing on there, User Interface Options, Show mini toolbar on selection. If you don’t want the mini toolbar uncheck that, click on OK to save your change, and no more mini toolbar.


Learn Excel 2013 Now I don’t really need to say anything more about the mini toolbar. I’m going to be using it a little throughout the course. It’s your choice whether you use it or not. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 7 – Backup and Recovery Video: Create Backup Option; Auto-Recovery and Autosave Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’d like to quickly cover Backup and Recovery or more specifically Auto-Recovery in Excel 2013. And, first of all, let me talk a little bit about Backup. When you are working with workbooks in Excel 2013, you’re basically working with files, probably mostly kept on your own computer although you could be keeping them on SkyDrive or on a Network Drive. But wherever you’re keeping those files, wherever you’re keeping those workbooks, it is very important that they’re part of a backup regime. You should make sure that you regularly take copies of all of the workbooks that have any value to you at all, which is probably the vast majority of them, and make sure that that copy is somewhere else, not on the same device as the original. Now I’m not going to talk in this section about setting up a backup regime; that should be part of how you look after the digital media that you create and maintain anyway. But this is by way of a reminder to say the Excel 2013 Workbooks that you create and maintain need to be part of whatever your backup regime is. If you haven’t got an effective backup regime I suggest that you get one in place soon. Now having said that I would like to quickly point out one little feature in Excel 2013 that is a sort of backup feature, but it’s not really what I’m talking about here. Let’s suppose you’ve created in this case Book 1, you’ve put some numbers in, and you want to save this particular workbook and you go into File, Save As. I’m going to save on My Computer, go into that Folder, etc. When you do a Save As, there is an option; there’s some Tools options here. We’re going to look at some of this later on. But amongst the options their General Options include one that says “Always create backup.” Now what this really means and I’m not going to go into it in detail here, but what it really means is when you save this particular workbook an additional copy will be saved but it will be saved in the same place. So you’re not talking about doing some sort of off-site backup somewhere else. It’s an additional copy of the same file with a slightly different file extension on it. It’s normally an XLK File. And that keeps an additional © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 copy. That means if you accidentally delete the original, the backup copy is there. Now the point I’m making here is that that isn’t the same as having a backup regime. With a backup regime, you have a copy of the files kept somewhere else. Now the idea of the backup regime is to keep a copy of your important files to cover situations like one where your computer gets stolen, your computer breaks down, or everything just gets accidently wiped. But that isn’t the only situation you need to cater for. And another situation which happens too frequently, perhaps not as frequently as it used to but it still happens, is that Excel itself fails, your computer fails, the power goes, something happens whereby partway through working on a particular workbook everything goes wrong and potentially you’re going to lose all of the work that you’ve done say in the last hour or two. Now Excel provides a very specific facility to deal with this and it’s called Autosave and Auto-Recover. And the principle of auto-save and auto-recover is that periodically when you’re working on one or more workbooks, Excel takes a copy of the work, puts it somewhere safe, and then if something horrible happens, if there’s a catastrophe such as Excel itself failing, power failure if you’re using a PC, some other disaster occurs, you can go back to the last auto-saved version of your workbook. Now there is a load on the system in doing this and you have to achieve a balance. You have to say, well, how often do I want Excel to make a copy of what I’m doing. And I need to balance that against the fact that if I told Excel, say, to do this every hour I could lose 59 minutes worth of work. By default Excel sets this up to happen every 10 minutes. So let’s see how we can set this period for auto-save. Into Backstage View, into the Options, and the page we want with Options is Save, and it’s really the top section here, Save Workbooks. Now the first important option here is this one, “Save auto-recover information every 10 minutes.” You can put that down to one minute or up to 120 minutes. And the next check box, the one within that, “Keep the last auto-save version if I close without saving.” Now when you close a workbook and you’re asked if you want to save the changes, most people at some stage have accidentally said No when they meant Yes or have said No and then realized at some later point, “Oh dear! I should’ve saved that last round of changes.” Now what Excel will do if you have this box checked is that it will keep the last Autosave version even if you’ve said Don’t Save; so if you subsequently discover that you should have you can still recover.


Learn Excel 2013 The next option here is the Auto-Recover File location. Excel sets up a default for you. It’s in my in my case users TobyA and then there’s a subfolder Updater and then Roaming and then Microsoft and then Excel. That’s the default really for Excel. You could put those AutoRecovery Files in a different location if you wanted to. You can also much further down the Options here you can specify that in a particular workbook, you can disable auto-recovery just for that workbook if for some reason when you’re working on a particular workbook you don’t need auto-recovery. There can be a number of reasons for this, one of them being that if there’s an element of automation in it anyway you may provide your own Auto-Recovery features as part of what you’re doing or indeed the Excel Auto-Recovery may conflict with what you’re doing. So for normal circumstances the key things here, you probably don’t need to change the AutoRecover File location. You should have a thought about this frequency of 10 minutes and I would suggest that you keep this on and probably the time is the only thing you need to change. So that’s a run through backup, Autosave, Auto-Recovery. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 8 – Entering and Deleting Data Video: Entering Text and Numbers Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m going to start to look at entering and editing data. Now I’m going to concentrate on getting the data in, whether it’s words or numbers, on changing data, selecting data, filling rows and columns, and so on rather than the actual formatting. We’re not concentrating so much here on making it look good. We’re concentrating on getting the data in. In subsequent sections we’ll look at the formatting side. Now in order to follow through this section, you’re going to need to have a way of entering numbers and letters. If you’re using a mouse and keyboard that’s absolutely fine. If you’re using a touch screen, you probably need now to use your on-screen keyboard. This is a touch devise. I have got an on-screen keyboard and I’ll just quickly enable it to take a quick look at it. Now you can see it there sort of super size. You should know how to enter letters, switch to upper case with the Shift key and back again, and then obviously entering numbers and some special characters. We’ll be using things like finance symbols, dollar signs. We’ll be using at signs, exclamation marks, and various other punctuations characters. So make sure you know how to enter those in order to be able to carry on with this section of the course. So let’s start with some really straightforward data entry. I’m going to create a new workbook. I’m just going to start with a blank workbook and by default the selected cell, we talked about selected cells before, is Cell A1. And I’m going to type in A1 the word Hello. Now if at the end of typing the word Hello and before I do anything else, I press the Enter key what happens is this, two things. First of all, what I’ve typed in A1 stays there. So the word Hello is in A1. And the selected cell moves down to A2. So if I now type World, press Enter again, World stays in A2 and the selected cell is now A3. Now this is the default behavior with Excel when after typing into a cell you press the Enter key. And as you go forward, you’re basically filling in a column of data. Now to start entering data anywhere else on the sheet, all I have to do is to click or tap in the cell. So let me click in that cell, start typing 1-2-3, press Enter, 2-3-4, press Enter, 3-4-5. You notice © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 that the same pattern continues, although in this case when we put numbers in the numbers are pushed to the right of the cell and the words to the left. I’ll come back to that in a while. If you’re using a touch screen pretty much the same. Tap somewhere, type what you want to type, and then other than that the behavior is exactly the same. If you wanted to fill in things in a row, horizontally, then you would really need to click into successive cells to do it in a very straightforward way. So click or tap to go across the row. So that’s the basics of filling in cells on a sheet and, of course, they don’t have to be adjacent cells. You can click anywhere you like, put data in anywhere you like on the sheet. So let’s now look at a straightforward case of setting up some data just by entering it straight into a worksheet. And what I’m going to do is to start to enter a list of somebody’s expenses. These are expenses related to work but they could be domestic expenses as well. So let’s close the current worksheet and we’ll start a nice new empty one. Now we’ve already seen a couple of ways of creating a new blank worksheet. There’s also a keyboard shortcut that you’ll probably find useful. It’s one of the ones that I do manage to remember and use quite a bit and that’s Control-N, new blank worksheet. And what I’m going to do now is to create a little expenses sheet for somebody. Now I’m going to start by selecting Cell B2 and I’m then going to type in the name of the expense that this person incurred on their business and it’s going to be. Now notice that as I’ve typed that although B2 is the selected cell, what I’ve typed won’t fit into B2, it’s too big. And so it spills over the other cells. Now it’s not actually in C2 or D2 or E2. It’s just that Excel because it can’t fit it lets it spill over. Now there’s a couple of ways of dealing with that issue but the way I’m going to deal with it first is to make Column B wider. Now before I do that I need to finish entering the data. I could, as we saw a little bit earlier on, press the Enter key and that would enter the data and take the selection down to B3. But I’m going to use this tick symbol here. And if I tick, notice B2 now is still selected. So if I use the tick rather than the Enter, the selection stays on the currently selected cell. I’ve still got the problem, however, that all of that text doesn’t fit into that little space. So to make Column B wider, if you hover the mouse over the top of Column B, you notice you’ve got a down pointing arrow. Now watch as I move the cursor to the right of B, the shape of the cursor changes to a vertical bar and then a horizontal bar, and on that horizontal bar it’s actually © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 a double headed arrow. While the cursor is that shape, if I click with the mouse and drag to the right, I can make Column B wider and I can make it wide enough to accommodate the words Train fare New York to Atlantic City. Similarly if I hovered over the header of Column A, I could do the same there, which has the affect of also moving the left hand edge of Column B. So using that approach I can change the width of any of the columns to any size that I want to. So now I’m going to go down to the next Cell in Column B and type in the description of my next expense. My next expense and so on. I’ll do a couple of more of those and then I’ll be back. So I’m still entering some descriptions for these business expenses. Whenever I’m entering them you will see on this which is called the Formula Bar a sort of copy of what I’m typing. So I’m partway through typing here Cab fare to Central Business. Now watch as I type District. You can see the copy there. Now that formula bar is particularly useful when, for instance, you find that you’ve made a mistake. Because when you’ve made a mistake you can either sort of delete back to where you were or you can put the cursor in the position where you’ve made the mistake. Now in this case, I could either click where I’ve left the T out of Central. I could click between the N and the R here but I often find it easier to put the cursor in the word with the error in the formula bar, type there the T, and then I can click again at the end and carry on typing. The other big advantage of using the formula bar, particularly when you’re editing rather than entering the content of a cell, is that if at any stage you decide that you don’t want to enter what you’re entering or that you’ve changed your mind about making a change, you can tick this cross, this is effectively a Cancel button here, and then it cancels the whole thing; the whole things just gone. You haven’t got to delete loads of characters. Now the Formula Bar is pretty useful because I think it particularly helps when you need to edit something that’s quite complex. But it does take up space. So there is an option to disable the formula bar. If you go into Excel Options from Backstage View as usual, go to the Advance Tab, and some way down the Advance tab, down in the section that says Display. About the third or fourth item down there is Show formula bar. And if you un-tick that, then you won’t see the Formula Bar. You can get by without the formula bar. You can do everything that you need


Learn Excel 2013 to do without it. I tend to use it because I tend to find it very helpful. But you’ll find out after a while whether it suits you. Okay so now what we’re going to do is to put in the cost of these expenses. So I’m going to go to C2 and I’m going to put in the cost of this train fare. I don’t really know what that train fare would have cost but I’m going to say 65.50. Lunch, I’m going to say that was 18.90, cab fare 14, dinner 32.80, not particularly expensive. Tick the last one. I’ve got my four expenses. Now with these expenses, I haven’t anywhere indicated that they are amounts of money. I’ve put them as numbers but they could be any sort of number. They could, for instance, be the temperature of something or they could the high or the length of something. So how do I indicate that they’re actually expenses? Okay, I could type a dollar sign in front of each of them but Excels a little bit cleverer than that. So let me go back up here to C2, the first expense that I put in, and with that cell selected I’m going to start using one or two of the commands on the Ribbon. And the first thing I’m going to do is to on the Home tab look at this command here, Number. I’m going to click the drop down arrow and what it comes up with is a list of available data types for the selected cell. Now if I click on the drop down, there I’m given the option: General, Number, Currency, Accounting, Short Date, Long Date, Time, Percentage, a whole long list of things. There are many more. If I want this to be a Currency then all I have to do is to click on that type and say this is actually a Currency Field. And not only does Excel now treat that as an amount of money but it even put the dollar sign in for me just to remind me that this is an amount of money. And, of course, I could tick on the next one, same decision, go down there, Currency. And in fact I could do all of them like that. However, there is a better way. And that is so far we’ve only dealt with selecting one cell at a time. How about selecting all four of these cells? Or better still how about selecting the whole of Column C? Now when you’re working Excel, you’re going to find one of the things you often have to do is to make a selection of more than one cell because you want to apply a command or you want to do something to more than one cell.

So it’s pretty straightforward in Excel to select more than one cell.

If I just

demonstrate something over here, starting at H3 if I just click with the mouse and pull out like that, I’ve got a multi-cell selection. I’ve got several rows, several columns, maybe about 50 cells selected there. If I just wanted to select those four, the four with the amounts of money in, I could select those four. I could go up here and do the same operation that I did just now. I could


Learn Excel 2013 even use this little shortcut button here to make them all into Accounting Number Format or I can choose between different Currency Formats.

English United States, English United

Kingdom, Euros, Chinese, French, so on. So having made a multiple selection, I can do several things to those at once. Similarly if I just want to go back and say, they’re all Currency that’s fine as well. So I can make a multiple selection like that very easily. Similarly if I click on the header of Column C, I will select every cell in Column C and I could say that every cell in Column C is actually Currency Format. That makes this basically a Currency Column. And when I type something else, say the next item, I put in is a value of 29.50, I type 29.5, tick on the formula bar, and it makes it Currency. So finally in this first section on entering and editing data, let’s just look at a couple of the equivalent things there using touch. If you tap on the header of Column B, you see the double headed arrow appear and then all you have to do is to tap and hold that arrow and you can pull it to the right to make that column wide just using touch. The other thing you notice when you do that is that you get Column B selected with these little circles either side. These are the selection handles that are associated with using a touch screen and you can use those to extend a selection. It’s an important distinction there. The double headed arrow in the header let’s you make the column wider whereas the little circles are selection handles. Let me just demonstrate selection somewhere else on this sheet using touch. If you just tap a cell, you get those two circles. Tap and hold one circle and you can make a multiple selection in just the same way that I did with the mouse just now. So, that’s the end of this first section on entering and editing data. Please join me for the next one.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Date Formats Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to continue looking at entering and editing data and in particular at some of the data formats that are available in Excel 2013. We’re going to continue with this straightforward sheet that we created in the previous section. We’ve got a couple of columns. We’ve got Column B which has the description of some business expenses and Column C which has the actual amount of money spent. We’re now going to put a date on each of these expenses. And the dates are going to go into Column A. Now the entry and editing of dates in Excel 2013 demonstrates a couple of very useful fundamental things and I want to spend a little bit of time on dates in this section. The first thing it demonstrates is that if you type part of a date into a cell, I’m actually going to use the Cell A2. So this is the date for the first expense in the list. What Excel thinks I’ve done will to some extent depend on the local setup of your device. Now I’m going to type 10/11. Now as you may appreciate it wouldn’t necessarily be the case that 10/11 is a date. 10/11 could be a fraction. It could be 10/11th’s of something. It could just be some sort of part code or other identification on an item. But let’s see what happens. Having entered 10/11 if I now press the Enter key watch what happens. And what happens is that Excel treats that as the 11th of October. Now that’s because dates in my case are being handled in U.S. Date Format. In another part of the world with somebody using a different format such as the U.K. Format that would be treated as the 10th of November; so 10/11 is the 10th of the 11th month. So, first of all, there’s a factor here related to locale and in order to understand that, we need to take a look in the Windows Control Panel. In Windows 8 from Control Panel, if you click on Region then we see this dialog and within this dialog a couple of things. First of all, I’m going to just click quickly on the second tab which is Location. My location is United Kingdom but I can also set various aspects of how things are displayed according to another location. And the other location I’ve got is U.S. So if I go to Formats, the Format in which I basically display Dates and Times for that matter is English United States. Now there’s basically for dates, there’s a Short Date Format and a Long Date Format. And there are examples of each based on the day that I’m recording this near the bottom of this tab of the dialog. The Short Date gives the month number which is 12, stroke, day number which is 3, stroke, year 2012. So that’s M/D/YYYY. That’s four digit year. The Long © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Date has actually four things in it. First of all, it has DDDD; now, the four D’s means that it’s going to show me the day of the week. So, first of all, it says Monday then four M’s, MMMM, means it’s going to give me the month number in four. So instead of putting 12 it puts December, the single D means a 3, and YYYY, 2012. So they are the defaults for displaying dates. Now note that in this case, I’ve got a day number, a month number, and a year number. So when I’ve got all three, it’s displayed in that format. Now when you look at your equivalent settings on your device, you may or may not be happy with these defaults. But you need to go into Control Panel to change them. Let me just give you an example. The drop down to the right of Short Date offers you various ways that you could display those depending on your locale. When you set the machine up, you’ll get a default for these which are usually the one that people use for your locale. But if you want to change it, you go into Control Panel to change it. However, I should point out we’re only talking here about the defaults. You can in Excel 2013 in any particular case change it to anything you want to. So let’s go back to Excel. So let’s see that default Short Date in action. On this occasion, I’m going to now enter the same date as I did in A2, but I’m going to enter it with all three parts specified. So the month number is 10, the day number is 11, the year number well it’s 2012 but I’ll just put 12; 10/11/12, press Enter, and as you can see Excel used the default Short Date display format which is 10/11/2012. That shows how the default date display works. Let’s now look at making a couple of changes to the format in which both of those dates are shown. So let’s take a look at formatting the two dates that we’ve put in already. And let’s start with that first one. Now the date is displayed there is 11-Oct. And I actually entered it as 10/11. To look at the formatting of any individual cell on a worksheet, there’s a couple of options. But one of the options is on the Ribbon. It’s in the Cells Group and if you click on the Format button or the little arrow to the right of the Format button, one of the options right at the bottom is Format Cells and that will format the selected cells. Now the selected cells in this case are just that one, the one that says 11-Oct. Now if you look at the Format Cells dialog, it has several tabs. We’re only interested in the first one at the moment. And what happens when you enter data in Excel 2013 is that Excel tries to figure out what sort of data it is. Now a little bit later on we’ll look at this very special category at the top, General, and you can see categories here like Date. You’d sort of expect that to be a date really wouldn’t you? But no, what Excel decided © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 was this is a custom piece of data and the format it decided on for this custom piece of data was d-mmm. Now the little D means the day number, so that’s the 11th. And three little M’s as opposed to four big M’s, three little M’s gives you the abbreviated form of the month name. So instead of putting October it puts Oct. To change that format, it’s really straightforward. All I have to do is to choose one of the others. Now not only can I choose one of the others and there are quite a few there, you can actually type your own in if you wanted to. So if I wanted to change the format, I could literally just type four big M’s instead, D, hyphen, four big M’s. Now watch what happens when I click on OK. What I’ve now got is 11-October. So you’ve seen a couple of very important things there. One of them is that for any cell or in fact any group of cells that you have selected, you can look at the format of that cell or those cells using the Format Cells dialog. And secondly, you’ve seen that you can change that format. Now you cannot change the format of every cell to any format you like. So for instance, the text there, Train fare New York to Atlantic City, you couldn’t turn that into a date. But you can do an awful lot of conversion, some of which might surprise you. But let’s now look at this second date, the one in A3 where we entered 10/11/2012. Now again we’re going to go into Format Cells to look at that. But on this occasion I want to just quickly show you how to do that with a touch screen. To do the equivalent with a touch screen what you need to do is to tap once on the cell to select it. You then get a version of a sort of mini toolbar and at the right of that mini toolbar, there’s a drop down. Click on the drop down and that gives you a contextual menu. And one of the items on the contextual menu is Format Cells. So you can tap on that and that brings you into exactly the same dialog that we looked at just now. Now what has happened here is very important because here because I entered three parts to the date, 10/11/12, Excel actually said that must be a date and it has formatted this cell as a Date Cell with a Date Value in it. And in addition, if you look on the right here, this box on the right, it has indicated which format it has assumed; 3/14/2012. Now note the little asterisk there. The asterisk there says look at the text at the bottom, second sentence. Date formats that begin with an asterisk respond to changes in Regional Date and Time settings that are specified for the operating system. So it has assumed not only that it’s a Date but it has decided that the format it’s going to use is the default Short Date Format. Now one of the advantages of this format and © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 it’s usually an advantage. Sometimes it can be a little bit of a disadvantage. But one of the advantages is that if I stick with these and somebody else looks at this same worksheet on a different machine, so for instance the computers that I use some of them are formatted as U.S., some of them are formatted as U.K. If I took this worksheet with this date setting and looked at it on a U.K. PC, the date format would be changed automatically on the display to show the U.K. format. So instead of saying 10/11/2012 it would say 11/10/2012 because in the U.K., we have the order Day/Month/Year not Month/Day/Year. So this is a good format from the point of view that other people looking at these dates in other locales will see them in their local format. If I didn’t want it to be flexible, if I wanted it to always look like that I’d choose one of the formats that doesn’t have an asterisk. Now just on this occasion, and just to demonstrate this a little bit more, let’s suppose that I still want to use one of the formats that responds to changes in locale. Let me say I wanted it in the Long Format. So I’m going to change the format to the Long Format and I’m going to click on OK. Watch what happens. Well what happens interestingly is that I get a line of hash symbols. Now with Excel, you’ll see a line of hash symbols quite a bit and that means there isn’t room to show what’s in this cell. And one thing I could do would be to change the format back to the old format. But what I’m going to do on this occasion is make Column A wider. Now I hope you can remember how to make a column wider. If you’re using keyboard and mouse hover over the right hand edge of the column letter at the top there, that’s A. When you’ve got the double sideways pointing arrows and the vertical bar click with the mouse, drag it out, and there we are. We can now see the full length default date format for that date. So, just a couple of other things to finish off with in this section. We specifically been mainly looking at dates but we’ve also looked at using Format Cells in general. Very often when you’re dealing with spreadsheets in Excel, you’re trying to format a whole block of cells. Sometimes it can be an individual cell which is what we’ve looked at here. But you may want to format a block of cells, a whole column, several columns, several rows; many, many possibilities. You always need to be aware of what you’ve got selected. When we were working just now in the Format Cells dialog we had that single cell selected. I could select both of these cells just by clicking in the first one, dragging down to the second one, or the equivalent on a touch screen. I could format all of these cells, that includes the three I haven’t put in values in already. Or


Learn Excel 2013 indeed I could format the whole of Column A. Let’s try formatting the whole of Column A as this Long Date format. So with Column A selected, all I need to do is to right click and one of the options there on the contextual menu when I right click with the mouse is Format Cells. Now note when I’ve got many cells selected and they currently have different formats so we know already that these two cells have got different formats at the moment, I’ll have no selection shown here. So what I’m doing here is choosing a format for all of the selected cells, that’s the whole of Column A. And if I’ve already got a conflict if you like, if these two already disagree, it won’t default to either of them. It’ll just leave me with a completely free choice to enforce on all of the cells. So let me go for Date. Let me specify that Long Format. Now see what happens when I click on OK. And I can see that both of those have now got the same format. Let me type a date into one of those empty cells now. Now the date I’m going to type is the next day in the sequence. So these were on October 11th. Now I’m talking about October 12th. But I’m only going to type 10/12 and press Enter. Watch what happens. It automatically gets the format that I’ve specified for Column A and I don’t have to type anymore than enough information to tell Excel 2013 what this new date is according to the new format. So there we are. We’ve covered quite a bit about data formats, particularly in relation to entering and displaying data. In the next section, we’re going to look at a few of the other formats that are available, but we’re also going to look at editing data and in fact at deleting data as well. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Formatting Cells; Editing and Deleting Data Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In the last two sections, we’ve been looking at entering data and particularly at different formats of data. I’d like to begin this third section on entering and editing data by looking at some of the other formats and then we’re going to look at editing and finally deleting data. So let’s begin by looking at some of the other numeric data formats. If I put, for instance, the number 0.5 into Cell B11, tick. I’ve still got Cell B11 selected. Now let me bring up the Format Cells dialog. And when I type in a number like that, what generally happens is that Excel 2013 assigns a format of General. And you see the little note there; General format cells have no specific number format. Now if I typed a dollar sign in beforehand, it would’ve assumed one of the finance related formats, probably Currency. But that would depend on a couple of other things as well. But generally speaking when you’re typing in it’s quite common for the format that’s assigned to be General. If I clicked on Number, then one of the things that happen is if I assign Number Format it says how many decimal places would you like? And by default there will be two. Note that this isn’t in Number Format yet. It still thinks it’s General. Until I click on OK on this dialog it will still thinks it’s General Format. But if I wanted to make it into a number and I wanted it to have two decimal places, I have two here. Let’s go for three decimal places. I can also say whether I want a thousand separator or not. Now whichever format you are assigning to the contents to one or more cells there will almost always be a set of other things that you can choose from and it will normally also show you the different ways that that number could appear. So for example, here it says for negative numbers you can have a minus sign, you can have the number in red, you can have the number in braces/brackets which is really an accounting standard to show negative numbers in brackets, or you can have red in brackets. So you can choose which format you’d like for negative numbers. So that’s the option here with a straightforward number. If I click on OK, I have got a three decimal place regular number. So let’s now try some of the other available number formats. We’ve already seen Currency. Note with Currency you can also specify the number of decimal places. I’m going to change it back to two. And you can also specify the Currency symbol. It defaults to the U.S. dollar here as I have the U.S. locale set. But you have virtually every available currency in the world is


Learn Excel 2013 available for you there. Obviously, if you’re working in any locale you may be dealing with currency in a different locale. So you need to be able to access other options. Accounting format is actually very, very similar to Currency. A couple of differences, one of them it deals with negative numbers in the standard accounting way. But secondly, the Currency symbol appears on the left of the cell. So if I turn 0.5 into Accounting format, it would look like this with a dollar at the left hand edge of the cell that the amount of money is in. Now, of course, when I entered this number I didn’t actually say to Excel this is an amount of money. I’ve told it that subsequently. So I could tell Excel that it actually is a Percentage. Click on OK and, of course, it’s 50.00%. Here’s another one. What about putting it as a fraction? It’s a half. And another one. What about putting it in scientific notation? That’s 5 times 10 to the minus 1. So let’s now look at these last two codes here. We have Custom and Special. Custom we saw before. And with Custom you can create a sort of pattern and you can require that data entered into one or more cells follows that pattern. Now using the Custom Format is beyond the scope of this course. We did see an example earlier on where it had interpreted what was intended to be a date as a Custom Format. But if I look next at Special, Special is really if you like a special case of Custom in that depending on your locale certain formats are provided for you. Now if your locale is United States, then you can choose one of these Special Formats: Zip Code, the Zip Code plus four, the longer one, a Phone Number, or Social Security Number. If for example you chose Social Security Number and applied that format to one or more cells then data entered into that cell or those cells would have to be a valid Social Security Number. And a similar thing applies for Phone Numbers and Zip Codes. Now you can create your own formats in custom or you can use the standard local ones in Special. If my locale was not English United States, let’s take another example. Let’s try French/France. Then I have a number of other formats. Many of these related to telephone numbers but also postal codes as well that a user with a locale of French/France could use for one or more cells on a worksheet. Let’s look at the Time Format. I’ve got a cell selected there, B11, Format Cells. Now I’ve got that set with a time format of, you see the example there, 13:30:55. So it’s 24 hour clock. It doesn’t have A.M.’s and P.M’s. It has 24 hour clock. Let me now type in that Cell 2, space, P.M. What do you think will happen? Click on tick and it’s 1400. So I’ve already told the cell © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 that it’s a time field and it’s a 24 hour clock. And provided I type something in there that is a valid time and as far as Excel is concerned 2 P.M. is a valid time, then it will display that time in the format I have specified for that cell. If I then go back into Format again, Format Cells, and supposing I now change to the A.M./P.M. format, clicked on OK, then it would show that time in the A.M./P.M. format. Now finally in terms of these formats let’s look at the Text Format which we’ve used already, but this particular Cell, C7, has a long line of text in it. We know that if there’s too much text to fit in the space available then with the settings we currently have the text appears in front of various other cells. If I go into Format Cells, the type again is defaulted to General. If I set it to Text, an important note there. Text format cells are treated as text even when a number is in the cell. The cell is displayed exactly as entered. So for instance, in the next cell if I actually typed 3.47, tick that, let’s check the format. Again, it’s defaulted to a General Format. If I make that text, note it’s now left aligned in the cell. Whatever I do other than changing the format of course that is treated as text. It’s not treated as a number. Excel won’t change the number of decimal places or put a scientific notation in or anything like that. Its text, exactly what you type is exactly what you’ll see. And that’s a very important distinction because sometimes you will want to put just a number in a text field and what you don’t want is for something to change that number when you don’t want it to be changed. So the important thing about text is you type text and that’s it. What you type is what you see. The next thing I’d like to look at is editing data.

And editing data is actually very

straightforward although there are two or three ways of going about it. Now let’s look at these two fields we’ve got here. We’ve got a field with some text in it and in fact we’ve got two fields with text in it but the second one appears to be a number although we know that it is actually text. If you click say in C7 here where we’ve got the long piece of text there are really three ways of going about editing it. One way of going about it is to just edit it within the cell. Now if you just wanted say to change the word Good, it’s actually quite tricky here because the word Good is in front of a different cell. It’s in front of the Cell E7 and you can’t actually edit it there because you’d actually be typing in E7. So what you can do as an alternative and something you may prefer to do anyway, instead of trying to type and edit within a cell is to use the formula bar. So if I wanted to change Good Men to Great Men having selected C7, I can click in the formula © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 bar to the right of the word Good then use the Backspace key to delete three characters and then type the new word. Now note that as I’m editing what I’m doing is being reflected down here in the Cell. And when I’ve finished I can either tick to complete the change or if I’m partway through I can press the Cancel button to cancel the change. Don’t forget there’s always the Undo option as well. So let me just Undo that change. Now there are a couple of ways of doing this that you might prefer. Let’s suppose that you wanted to make that same change that I just made but using the cell. As I said that’s a little bit tricky. But if you double click on C7, you get a cursor appearing. You can now use the cursor keys to go out to the right even though you’re in front of some of those other cells like D7 and E7. You can literally delete the three letters at the end of Good and you can type. Note the cursor is still in effectively C7 even though the contents of C7 spill over in front of other cells. So again I could tick, and then Undo if necessary if I didn’t want that change. If I cross at this stage then it just cancels the work that I’ve done. Now if you’re using a touch device and you want to edit the contents of a cell, you just need to double tap on the cell and the cursor as you see there appears in the cell and you can move it around, you can use the Delete key, type, etc. Now you’ll be getting quite a bit more practice later in the course on editing but there’s one other thing I need to show you now and that is how to delete and clear contents of cells and parts of cells. Let’s just take, for example, cell A4 in this spreadsheet. This A4 contains a date that we entered earlier on. Note that the whole cell is selected. I can see the outline of the cell and you can’t see the cursor within the text anywhere either there or in the formula bar. When a whole cell is selected, if you press the Del or Delete key, the whole contents are deleted. If on the other hand, let’s take Cab fare to Grand Hotel, select that, but this time let’s double click it as though we were going to edit within the text. Note the cursor now is partway through the word Grand in the cell. Similarly I could click in the formula bar and do it there. If I press the Delete key now, I only delete a single character. If I press the Backspace key, I delete the character to the left of the cursor. So the Backspace key in this case will delete the R. If I press the Delete key or Del key, I’ll delete the character to the right of the cursor which in this case will be the N. So that’s how to delete a single character and that’s how to clear the whole contents of a cell. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So now I’m going to give you one of these to try for yourself. If you go into Backstage View and then Open, you should find on Recent Workbooks the example-01 which will be in the folder of the examples that you downloaded with the course. If you can’t see that, if you’ve perhaps been doing other things, it’s not on your Recent Workbooks, then just go into Computer and browse in the usual way. But one way or another open example-01 and that particular example, it’s a fairly straightforward spreadsheet with opening and closing times of a particular facility. Now the opening times on Mondays are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. What we’re going to do is we’re going to change these times and we’re going to show the times on the 24 hour clock. So that should say 0800, that should say 1700, and so on. Also, I want you to change Saturday to be 7 p.m. instead of 8 p.m. And then if you’d like a real challenge change the Opening Hours 2012 to say Opening Hours 2013. Now you may well think that changing Opening Hours 2012 to Opening Hours 2013 is pretty straightforward. But it’s a little bit different because what we’ve got here are what are called merged cells and that’s something we’re going to look at later on. But I’ll just give you a little clue there. If you click in A1, you will see in the formula bar what you need to change. So I’ll leave you to do that for yourself. Look at example-02 when you’re finished to make sure you agree with what’s there. And I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Fill Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m going to take a look at Fill and in particular take a look at a new feature of Excel 2013 which is called Flash Fill. But let’s start with the basic Fill facility first. Even on the basis of what you’ve seen so far, you’ll realize by now that you have a lot of data with Excel and very often the data is there to help to categorize or form headings for other data. You have data related to Dates and Time, sizes, lengths, all sorts of numerical data in particular. And very often you need to establish headings or categories where there is a distinct pattern. Let me give you an example. Let’s suppose that you were doing a company’s accounts for the last year. You could probably realize even if you don’t do a lot of accountancy work yourself that you probably need to put all the months of the last year into columns or rows on a worksheet. One of the features of Excel, which is one of its great strengths, is the ability to fill in similar values in cells. I’m going to show you a very straightforward example of that now. Let’s suppose that in this empty workbook I type in the Cell B2. I’m just going to type January. Now if I hover over that little black square in the corner of the selection rectangle around B2, the one we mentioned before. It’s actually called the Fill handle. Let me pull it now. I’m using the Fill handle and I’ve pulled the cell right out to Column M. Now I’m going to release it and look what Excel does for me. It looks at what I’ve put in B2. It says January. It recognizes January as a month of the year and as I fill to the right it fills in the other months. Now that may or may not be what I wanted to do and I’ll come back to that question in a moment. But very often it is what I want to do and very often that’s really helpful because it avoids the need for me to go through and type in all of those month names. Now Excel is certainly not restricted to dealing with months and there are various sorts of Fill that you can use. Let’s try a different one. I’ve selected Cell B4. I’m typing a one in there, B5 type a two in there, select both cells, and pull the handle down, the Fill handle. Now as I pull if you look to the right of where the cursor is, you’ll see Excel is almost thinking out loud in a way there. It’s saying that’s 6, that’s 7, 8, 9. It’s showing me what it’s thinking as it goes through and when I go down to here and release I can see that it’s managed to fill in what I’m going to refer to as a Series here. So it’s intelligently from the fact that I put a one in first and then a two,


Learn Excel 2013 Excel looks at what I’ve done and assumes how I want the Series to continue. So as I do the fill in there it just carries on, on the same pattern. It says well one, two so the next one must be three, the next one must be four, and so on. Now it doesn’t have to be a sequence just like that. So let me just Undo that, go back to when I just had those two cells and I’m going to change the value in two to four, select the two cells again. It’s very important that I select them both so that Excel can see the pattern. Starting at one, then going to four, now watch what happens as I fill down. Now it realizes I want to count up in threes. So it’s absolutely fine. It’s happy with counting up in threes and that’s exactly what it does. Now we could apply the same principle over here to the month, say if I wanted to count up in months. But there is actually a much more flexible way of doing that. Now what we’ve done in both of these examples is to create a Series using the Fill handle and a starting point. In the first one, we used the starting point of January and what Excel 2013 did by default was to assume if it sees the word January that we’re talking about working in months. And then when we did the numerical one here, it only needed the first two cells, the one and the four, to work out what the series of numbers was. Now you can certainly fill in and create series in that way. But there’s another way of doing it as well and let me show you how the other way works. Let’s suppose that I select Cell D4 and I type in there the 1st of March 2013 in that format. Now, if I wanted to create a similar kind of series to the one we’ve got up there and I’m going to do it this time as a column and I wanted to make each value, each cell three months more than the previous one, then I can do it in this way. If you look at the Home tab in the Editing Group, on the left there’s three buttons, and the middle one is called the Fill button. Click on the drop down and one of the options on the drop down is Series. Now if I click on Series, it will let me choose everything I need to choose about this series. It says, first of all, do you want to go in rows or do you want to go in columns? Well, I’m going to go in columns. What type of data is it? Is it straightforward linear data, growth data, date data, auto-fill data? Now this is date data. We’re dealing with dates. Now what is the Date Unit? Now the date unit I’m going to use on this occasion is the month and the Step Value, I’m not going to go up in steps of one month. I’m going to go up in steps of three months. And I can specify a Stop Value or not as I want to. Now supposing I decided my Stop Value was going to be the 31st of December 2016. Click on OK, let’s see what © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Excel does. And what it does is it gives us a series going up in three month increments. The first of each month of three month intervals until it gets to the last value it can before my Stop Value. Now I set a Stop Value of the 31st of December 2016. It got to the 1st and then it decided that the next one would be beyond my Stop Value so it stopped at the 1st of December 2016. So that’s a completely different way of achieving the same effect. This facility can be very flexible and very often it’s quicker to use that Series dialog than to use the Fill alone. Let me show you a slightly more complicated example. Let’s suppose I wanted to start a Date Series on the 1st of March 2013 as I’ve got here but this time what I’m going to do is I’m going to use the Series dialog. I’m going to this time go in rows, still date type but this time instead of going up a month at a time I’m going to specify to go up in intervals of say 27 days at a time which is a very strange interval but there you are. It’s just to demonstrate that you can pretty much have any combination you like. So if I go up in 27 day intervals and say stop on the 20th of February 2015, click on OK. Now bear in mind the series of hashes there are just because the columns are too narrow. I’ll show you how to deal with that properly later on. And you can see I’m going up in 27 day intervals. So it’s a really flexible way of filling in regular patterns of numbers and dates in particular in Excel 2013. Now I’ve got a couple of other very important things to show you in relation to Fill and Series. I’m going to clear this particular worksheet. Now, of course, I could just close this without saving changes and create a new one. But if you wanted to clear everything on a worksheet without closing it, there’s a very good way of doing that. If you look in the top left hand corner to the top and left of Cell A1, there’s a little sort of icon there. If you click that what happens is you select all the cells on a worksheet, every single one of them. If you then press the Delete key, you’ve cleared everything. Now to be fair it’s a little bit more complicated than that because there’s something going on under the hood that I haven’t mentioned yet and I’ll come back to that later if there’s time. But for the moment think of that as clearing everything and let’s now look at Fill one more time. Let me put a three in there and a four in there and let me select those two cells. Now when you’re doing Fill, you don’t necessarily fill down or to the right. You can also fill to the left, in which case, of course, in this case it will fill numerically downwards, so you go 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, -1, -2. Let’s Undo that. You could fill upwards. What do you think would happen if we fill upwards? Well in an upwards direction we only have one © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 number in that Cell G10. So given that we’ve only got one number in G10, a 4, when you fill up you just get another 4 in every cell; similarly the 3’s; a 3 in every Cell. That should enable you to work out what happens if I fill down, pretty much the same thing, Undo that. And then if I fill right, obviously the numbers have gone up: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Because starting with the selection of two Cells, 3 and 4 which I had, it will assume that I want to continue going up in this linear series one at a time. What if I just selected the 4 and went right? What do you think would happen? That’s right. You just get 4 because I’ve only given it a 4 to start with. There is no sense of the numbers going up and down. There’s no increment. It just fills in the same thing. Now sometimes you want it to fill in the same thing. You want the same content in every cell and that’s how you achieve it. Now when it comes to filling in the same contents everywhere, say you want the same Heading, the same date, some other numeric or text value that you want the same everywhere. So for instance, if I had the word Hello in this cell, if all you want to do is to have Hello across all of those cells, then you don’t need to use the Fill handle. You can select the cells you want, make sure that the first one has got in it the value that you want to copy effectively, and then on this drop down you can say Fill right and you’ll get the same value throughout. Similarly if you selected all of those and did fill down, you’d get everything filled all the way down as well. So instead of using the Fill handle, you can use the drop down menu there on the Home tab in the Editing Group on the Fill button, the drop down there let’s you Fill down right, up, and left without doing a series. So there we are. That’s the basic use of Fill. In the next section, we’re going to look at the new aspect of Fill, the new Fill feature which really is a very strong, a very powerful feature which is introduced in Excel 2013 and its called Flash Fill. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Flash Fill Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. It’s very often the case when you’re working with Excel that you have a large amount of data which needs to be subjected to some fairly routine repetitive processing. And one of the new features in Excel 2013, which is Flash Fill, can really help with that. And I’m going to demonstrate Flash Fill using one or two specific examples. Now the examples I’m going to use are based on the worksheet that you can see in front of you. And in this worksheet, I’ve got some very simple data about some of my customers. I’ve got their home phone numbers, seven digits, and I’ve got last name and first name of each of the customers. And what I want to do is to make a couple of new columns out of this data and I’m going to get Flash Fill to help me to do it. Now the home phone numbers that I’m using on the left are obviously not complete numbers. They’re just the last seven digits of those numbers. And normally when you see those numbers written out, they will be written out in a format like this: 395-6492. And what I’d really like is for each of those phone numbers to have that hyphen put in the relevant position. Now if you’ve used Excel before, you’ll know that you could write a formula using some string functions in Excel to do that for you and to automate this process and that would be absolutely fine. It’s the sort of thing we’re going to look at later on. But Flash Fill offers you an even quicker way of doing it. Having entered one of those numbers correctly, if I go to the second one and just start typing the second one, so the second one will be ultimately be 722-9845, watch what happens if I just type the seven. Basically Flash Fill or more specifically Excel with the help of the Flash Fill facility looks at the whole of the Column next to the one I’m working in and it works out what each of the other should be based on what I’ve done in the first one. So it uses the first one as a sort of model and it says okay, I can see what you’re doing there. Well, if I applied the same principle to the rest of the column this is how all of the others would look. Now I can look at all those and I can say actually, that’s absolutely right. They’ll all be absolutely correct. And then all I have to do is to press the Enter key and the whole lot is accepted. Just think how much work that saved me being able to do that. Now in this case, I’ve


Learn Excel 2013 only got somewhere between 20 and 30 phone numbers, but if I had hundreds or thousands that would be a huge time saver. Now if you experiment with Flash Fill a little, you will find that you can actually achieve some pretty sophisticated affects with it. And in the next example, I’m going to actually two columns and combine the content of two columns. I have here, for example, last name and first name. And let’s suppose that I want to put together a complete name, a whole name for each of these people. And I’m going to do it in this format. I’m going to do Hilda Anderson. Okay, that’s how I want them to look. So the next one will be Ray and as you can see once again it’s worked out what they should all be. So that’s fine, but let’s assume now that I think again and decide that I don’t actually want that format. I’d rather have surname, then a comma and a space, and then the first name. If you change your mind or if you look at the suggestions and you decide that it’s not setup correctly, the way to effectively cancel what Flash Fill is trying to do is to press the Escape key. So if you press Escape, you’ll lose all of its suggestions. You can then just delete the one you were working on, go back up to the beginning again, and say okay, what I’m going to do now is I’m really going to start this again with a different format. So now I’m going to go for Anderson, Hilda. Well what about just Anderson, H, just the first initial? Anderson, H. And then we’ll try and as you can see it’s worked it out. It’s taking the surname, comma, space, and then the first character of the first name. So I look through those. I think actually they all look fine, hit the Enter key, and they’re all accepted. And that again has saved me a huge amount of typing or putting together a formula to do the job for me. So that’s Flash Fill, a really useful new feature in Excel 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 9 – Formatting a Worksheet Video: Themes and Cell Styles Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Themes and Styles. Now to some extent what we’re going to cover in this section is a little bit ahead of the rest of the course, but in order to understand the next couple of sections, you’re going to need to have a reasonable idea of what themes and styles are. And I’m, first of all, going to demonstrate themes and styles using one of the standard templates that’s available with Excel 2013. So what we’re going to do is to choose the Calendar Template and create a new workbook based on the Calendar Template and there it is. It’s a very straightforward workbook this. It’s got a single sheet which is the calendar and the one that you get by default at least at the time I’m running this is the 2013 calendar. And as it says over here if you need a different year enter your preferred calendar year in Cell B2. This is another case where some of the cells in this worksheet are merged. And if you click in Cell B2, which appears to be about there, you’re actually getting a cell which really spans what were originally several cells. Now incidentally this particular worksheet, this calendar demonstrates that the number of rows in a worksheet can be more than you can see in one view. You may realize already that the number of rows can go on. In fact, it can go up to many thousands of rows. And here you can see how if I scroll down the worksheet content, the calendar, the 12 months down to December 2013 goes on to a very large number of rows. And similarly if I scroll off to the right, you can see the column numbers at the top there going through the letters of the alphabet. Well, in fact beyond that it can go up into A’s, B’s, and again thousands and thousands of those are possible. So you’re not restricted in Excel 2013 to what you can see in the view, but more of that later. Now one of the things that are being done in this particular template and in this calendar is to use a theme. Now when you’re formatting this is really primarily for the purposes if you like cosmetics. When you’re formatting a worksheet, when you’re putting in the colors, the fonts, and so on, you can adopt either one of the standard Excel 2013 themes or you can even create a


Learn Excel 2013 theme of your own. And when you’re formatting there are basically three levels of formatting and the theme is at the top level of the formatting. Now let me, first of all, show you some alternative themes. And this also demonstrates a very important Live Preview aspect of Excel 2013. So click on the Page Layout tab and right over on the left in the Themes Group there is a Themes button and at the bottom of the Themes button there’s a little drop down arrow. If I click on the little arrow and I can see a list of available themes. Now there are several there. There are about 20. But there are also facilities to browse for additional themes on the Microsoft website. We’ll have a look at that in just a moment. Let’s stick with the ones that we get with Excel 2013. Now if I hover over one of those icons in the gallery above where the cursor is now I will get a preview of how this calendar would look if I used one of those themes. And you’ll notice that each of the themes has a name. So I’m going to start with the Office Theme and as I hover over the Office Theme I want you to look at the affect on the calendar. Now I’m hovered over the Office Theme. You can see the screen tip there saying Office and you can see the change in the colors of the calendar. Now loosely speaking the calendar has day of the week headings: S, M, T, W, T, F, S. It has the contents of the calendar itself, that’s the day numbers from 1 up to 28 to 30/31 depending on the month. And then each of those numbers and letters has a particular font. Now let me hover over one or two of the other themes so that you can see what changes. Let’s go from Office to Facet. Notice how the colors change. In fact, the font changes as well. That may be a little more difficult for you to see. But let’s try Integral and then let’s go down to that one. Again, you could probably more easily see here the change in font. And each of these themes has not only its own color scheme but also its own fonts. So at the top level we have the theme and by default with a new workbook, Excel 2013 applies the Office Theme. So that’s the one you get by default. And it’s up to you whether you change the theme. Now the next thing I want to demonstrate is what happens with a new workbook. As I said before, a new workbook when you create it gets the default Office Theme. There’s a new workbook. I’ve just put a little bit of content there, the word Hello there and then three numbers. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Go to the Page Layout tab, click on Themes. Office is the default Theme. You can see it selected there. Now look at the words Hello there and the numbers as I hover over other themes. Facet. Now you notice how the font changes. There is no color on that sheet at the moment. So none of the colors are changing but you can more clearly see how the font changes depending on the theme. Now until I click on a theme it doesn’t get applied to the workbook. So I’m still using Office but I’m doing live preview on the others. The reason that there are no color changes is that I haven’t yet used the second level of formatting in Excel 2013. We’ve seen how a theme can apply in this case to a whole workbook, but we can also decide at the next level down that certain cells or groups of cells have what are called Cell Styles. So let’s look at cell styles next. So what I’m going to do first is to select the cell that says Hello there and then on the Home tab in the Styles Group there is a command, Cell Styles. And if I click on the drop down, I see a list of available cell styles. Now the cell styles are in a number of groups and I’m not going to go through all of the groups now but we’ll look at them a little bit later on. We have Titles and Headings Group where we basically can structure the contents of a worksheet or a whole workbook according to heading levels, much as you would say in a Word Process Document. So you could, for instance, decide that the Hello there field is actually a Heading Level 1 or a Heading Level 2 or a Heading Level 3. Let’s suppose it’s a Heading 2. So if I click on Heading 2, it becomes a Heading Level 2 entry in my worksheet. Now let’s try the 1 next. And with the 1 let’s go into Cell Styles. Let’s say that’s going to take one of the Good, Bad, or Neutral Styles. So let’s say 1 is Bad, 2 is Good, and 3 is Neutral. Now, that means that all four of those cells have a cell style. And what happens with the cell style will depend on which theme we have. So if I structure my worksheet like that and then go back into Page Layout, Themes; still on the Office Theme. So now see what happens as I try the other themes. Let’s try to the Facet Theme. Look at those four cells. With the Facet Theme the coloring stays the same on 1, 2, and 3, but notice how with Hello there the coloring on the underline and the size of the font, the font itself changed. Let’s try Integral. Again, font change, size change, coloring of the underline in the Heading 2 field changes.


Learn Excel 2013 Now as I go through and preview the other themes, you can see the affect on each of those. Now what you can see if you look at the 1, 2, and 3, for example, the coloring in the background does not change but of course the fonts and the size of the numbers in the fonts does change depending on the selected theme. So when you create a workbook it gets the default theme, you can change the theme to any of the available themes if you want to. If in a workbook on a particular worksheet you assign a cell style to one or more cells, then how those cells appear will depend on the style you apply and that in turn depends on the theme that you have applied. If you use cell styles extensively, then it makes it much easier to change the overall look and feel of a particular workbook because as you change the theme many or most or all of the elements within the workbook will change their style accordingly. This is also particularly helpful if you’re trying to match a theme in another document, for instance a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document, because the themes in Office 2013 are common across the various components of the Office Suite. Now that’s the first two levels, Theme and Cell Style. The third level is direct formatting because you can completely avoid, you can make something completely independent of the theme if you want to. And what I’ve done here is I’ve merged three cells into one. I’ve typed in there direct formatting and I’m going to directly format this cell and just demonstrate that a change of theme makes no change to it whatsoever. Now the first thing I’m going to do with this cell selected is to change the font. So I go to the Home tab, drop down for the font. I’m going to go for the Algerian Font and I’m then going to fill in the background color. Now we haven’t looked at filling color at the moment. We’re coming back to that in a couple of sections time, but I’m just going to briefly show you how to do this. There is a button here, Fill Color, with a drop down. Click on the drop down. This drop down is one we’ll look at in detail later. But the most important thing here in terms of what we’re doing at the moment is that the drop down is divided into two groups: Theme Colors and Standard Colors. Now Theme Colors are ones that change with the theme. So if I chose one of these colors to fill that in with it would change with the theme. If I choose a Standard Color, it will be independent of the theme. So I’m just going to put in that color. Now watch what happens if I go back to the Page Layout tab, click on the Themes drop down. I’ve currently got the Office Theme. Watch the direct formatting cells as I change or I preview changes to the theme. Now although it hops about a bit because of changes © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 in size elsewhere the cells, the three merged cells together, the background doesn’t change, the color doesn’t change, the font doesn’t change, the size of the font doesn’t change. It stays exactly the same whatever I do even though everything else changes; nothing about those changes other than its position, of course. So that’s the third level, that’s how you make a cell or some cells independent of the theme. Now just one other thing to mention about themes before we move on. I mentioned this much earlier on. If you search online and particularly if you go to Microsoft.com, there are available a number of additional themes. They come in a file which normally has an extension of THMX and if you download those and store those on your device when you come to apply a theme as we saw earlier on Themes, browse for themes, having downloaded one or more THMX files all ready, Browse to that location, open one of the THMX files, and you can use one of those themes that you’ve downloaded from elsewhere. There are commercial sites that offer these themes and provided you could make sure that the one that you’re looking at is a reputable service, it gives you another way of getting different themes from outside of Excel 2013 Standard Themes. And as I mentioned just now you can in fact create and save your own themes as well if you want to. So that’s Themes and Styles for now. Let’s get started on formatting a worksheet or two. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Inserting, Deleting, Hiding and Adjusting Rows and Columns Toby: Hello again. In this section, we’re going to start to look at formatting of our workbooks and worksheets. We’re going to try to make them look good for one thing, partly to help to make our point, to present what we’re trying to do clearly, but also to make what we’re doing more interesting so that people won’t be just put off by a very blank, boring sheet of black numbers on a white background or something like that. But as part of that we also need to know how to change what we’re doing as we go along. If you need an extra column in a particular place or you need a few rows or you need to color something in a particular way or perhaps either change the overall look and feel of the whole thing or perhaps make it match something else you’ve done in Office 2013 not only for its own sake but also to make what we’ve done as appealing as we can to other people. Now, in order to demonstrate some of this basic formatting, let’s start with this simple list of expenses that we had earlier on. And the first thing I want to do is I want to have an additional row before the expenses that are currently there. So the expenses start on Row 2. I’d like two blank rows before that. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to select Row 2, and then there are a number of options. One of the options is on the Home tab in the Cells Group the first Command at the top there, Insert has a drop down next to it, and one of the commands there is Insert Sheet Rows. Now that command will cause the same number of rows as I have selected, which is one row to be inserted above the currently selected row. So if I click on Insert Sheet Rows now, I will get one new blank sheet row. Now, if I instead of that I indeed selected two rows and done exactly the same thing I would have got two blank rows. But I only wanted one so let me Undo that and I’ve got my one blank row. Now that’s one of the ways of inserting a blank row. If I’d selected that row and done a right click the Contextual Menu would have also given me an Insert option and in fact we’re going to insert an additional column now so I’ll use that approach on the column. So let’s suppose I want another blank column before Column B. If I right click on Column B and say Insert Excel knows that as I’ve got a column selected, I must want a column inserted. So it knows to insert a column rather than a row. Click on Insert and I get a new blank column.


Learn Excel 2013 Now one of the things that I need to point out here is that as you insert columns and rows on a worksheet Excel, automatically renames and renumbers what’s there. Now as you’ll see quite a bit later on in the course, once we start using formulae to do arithmetic and statistical analysis and so on, on the numbers in a worksheet Excel has to do quite a lot of work to keep up to date with us inserting rows, inserting columns, deleting cells, and so on. So it’s quite a complicated job that it has to do. But you can trust Excel to do that correctly because as you insert and delete rows, columns, and cells Excel will keep track of everything even though the names of things do tend to change. Now, of course, the other thing you may need to do from time to time is to delete a row or column. Again, pretty straightforward. If you say select Row 2, right click, one of the options is Delete. Note that underneath the Delete entry, you’ve got another one that says Clear Contents. If you’ve got a row of content in a worksheet, you still need a row there but you don’t want any of the content that’s currently there. Rather than delete the row and insert an empty one, you can just use Clear Contents. Similarly, if I have a column, say Column B selected, I have the equivalent delete which would delete the column or Clear Contents which will clear the contents of the column. Now what I want to do now is to show you some of the other manipulations we can do on what can be seen on a worksheet. The first thing I’m going to do is to put in details of the dates that each of these expenditures was incurred. Now if I go to Column A, I’m going to right click on Column A and I’m going to do Format Cells again. Now I’m going to format the date as the standard Short Date which is Month/Day/four digit year, click on OK. Now I’m going to put in the first date, 11/10, that’ll be enough. That will become November 10th. And then I’m going to put in the rest of those dates and just join me when I finish those. So there we are. I’ve got those five dates in place. Now in Column B I’m going to put information which is basically a categorization of expenses. So for instance, a train fare will count as travel, lunch with a client would count as entertainment, and these categories are obviously dictated by my company and they are used to analyze my spending on expenses and in fact for the whole company.

So they’re going to prove to be a very important piece of


Learn Excel 2013 information that we’ll be using later on. So I’ll put the rest of these in and then join me again for that. Now, of course, different companies will have different categories for their expenses so I’m not implying that these are the same ones that you would use in your own company. But what I’m now going to do is to say that in a particular situation I may want to show this information to somebody or perhaps print it out, but I don’t need to include say the contents of Column B. So I don’t need to show what the categorization is. I want to keep it pretty simple and just have a simple list of expenses. Perhaps when I’m just checking that the expenses, I’ve got paid by the company are correct or for some other reason where I don’t need all of this detail. If you select Column B and in fact right click on Column B, one of the options you have there is Hide. And what happens is that the details in that Column are not deleted. In fact they’re not even particularly well hidden because as you can see from the Column Headings if something’s going from Column A to Column C there’s obviously a Column B in between that’s not visible at the moment. And what we’ve done and by no means is secure in the fact that somebody could easily unhide those columns, but if all you want to do without any kind of implication of security is to just temporarily hide one or more columns or indeed one or more rows, that’s a very simple way of hiding them from view while you’re doing something else while you’re printing them or viewing them or whatever it might be. It’s then a very straightforward case of un-hiding them because all you have to do is select the columns either side of the hidden one, right click, click on unhide, and Column B is unhidden again. So, when you’re working on a worksheet you now know how to insert rows, you know how to insert columns, you know how to delete rows and columns and you know how to hide and unhide rows and columns. Something else you’re going to need to be able to do with rows and columns sometimes is adjust their height or width. Now in the case of columns, we saw earlier on in the course how to adjust the width of a column manually. It’s pretty straightforward. All you have to do is to grab the top of the column, the right edge of the top, and you can adjust it at will. But it’s also possible to do this automatically. Now if you take Column D here for example, the one with the costs associated with each item of expenditure, if I select Column D and right click one of the options there is Column Width. And if I click on Column Width, it brings up a little Column Width dialog in which I can manually adjust the column width. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Now the units that column width and indeed Row Height are given in are not necessarily the easiest units in the world to deal with. So I’m not going to go into that now. You could say, well, if that’s 19.57-something’s wide, I don’t really want it as wide as that; I only want it say 10 or something like that. You could try that, click on OK, see if it’s the sort of width that you want. But there is also an option of automating column width. So again with Column D selected if I click on Format, one of the options under cell size is AutoFit Column Width and what Excel will do for you is to choose a column width that’s just right for the data that you’ve got in that column. So watch what happens if I do that here. And as you can see it allows very little space either side but it pretty much makes the column the right width for the contents. And then it’s pretty straightforward to extend that to cover all four of these columns. If you click with the mouse to select Column A, drag across B, C, and D, use the same command on the Home tab in the Cells Group, Format, AutoFit Column Width. It will now auto-fit the column width for all selected columns, click on that, and the width of all four is adjusted. Now, of course, exactly the same approach can be taken to Row Height. If I selected say all of the first seven rows, two of them remember are empty, five of them have content. Go back to that same Menu and say AutoFit Row Height, you’ll see that it hasn’t actually changed anything there because all of these were at the default row height anyway and it won’t go beyond the default. I could manually, of course, adjust any row height to anything that I wanted, including making the row heights of rows with content in them smaller than they should be and then I wouldn’t be able to read the content very well. So for instance there on row height if I went to Format Row Height which is currently 15 units and I changed it to 5, it would let me do it but, of course, I wouldn’t be able to read the content. So you have a lot of power and flexibility in terms of what you select on row height and column width and how you do it, but you can make things worse if you’re not careful. And the other thing to bear in mind, particularly if you’re working on a large and complex worksheet, if you select the whole sheet and I’ve shown you how to do that already, so you can click on the icon in the top left hand corner here that selects the whole sheet, you can apply either or both of AutoFit Column Width, AutoFit Row Height to all columns or all rows in a worksheet.


Learn Excel 2013 So just one final thing to show you on here; in terms of row height that can also manually be set as we saw just now when we put a number in. You can also do this by dragging, of course. So if I were to select the lower border on Row 7’s label on the left, I can drag that down to make row 7 much taller or indeed to make row 7 much shorter. And again, I’ve got the same danger there of making it so short that I can’t read what’s in it. But that can all be done manually as well. And, of course, with all of these there is a touch equivalent. If I wanted to manually adjust the height of row 7 for example, if I touch there then I would get the handle in this case horizontal line, then the vertical line with the double arrowhead. I can grab that with my finger and make that taller or indeed shorter. And then similarly if I just tap in there, I will bring up a little mini toolbar with options such as Hide, Unhide, Insert, and Delete on it. So basically I can do all of the things with touch that I can do with the keyboard and mouse. So, that’s it on the first part of formatting a worksheet. You should be able to adjust heights, widths of rows and columns, insert rows and columns, delete rows and columns, and so on. We now need to move on to the actual formatting part. So that’s things like alignment, coloring, and using the Excel 2013 Themes and Styles. And we’re going to cover that in the next section, so I’ll see you then.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Wrap Text and Alignment Toby: Hello again. In this section, we’re looking again at formatting a worksheet in our course on Excel 2013. In the previous section, we looked at things like inserting and deleting columns and rows. In this one, we’re going to look at a little bit more detail on formatting a worksheet. Now I’ve gone back to the table of expenses that we looked at earlier on. I’ve inserted another column here. The other column I’ve got here is one that denotes the name of the particular customer that a particular expense was associated with. Where there isn’t a customer name then I’ve just put it under the heading of prospects. This is for potential customers. And one of the entries here I’ve left blank and I’ll talk about that in a moment or two. So having entered this other Column what I’m now going to do is to set about formatting it in a better way, make it look a little bit more attractive. And we’re going to use both the work we’ve done already on formatting columns and rows but also we’re going to introduce theme and style considerations as well. So let’s get started. Now one of the first things that I’m going to deal with here is what happens in a situation like this one where I’ve added another row but the description of the expense is now even longer than any of the ones that we’ve had before. And potentially dealing with a description as long as the long that I’ve typed in there is going to mean that in order to extend the width of Column D enough to accommodate that, first of all the width of the overall expenses claim is going to get wider and wider and secondly there’s a lot of wasted space here with the others. So the first thing I want to show you is that when you’re dealing with text fields, you can actually use more than one line for a description in this case and you can do that by wrapping text. Now if I select Column D, right click, and go into Format Cells, then one of the options there on the Alignment tab is Wrap Text. So let’s check Wrap Text, click on OK, and see what happens. Now at the moment there’s no need for the text to wrap because it’s got plenty of width. But supposing I reduced the Column D width down again, watch what happens as I reduce it. Now when I get to that point you can see that in two of the entries the text has wrapped. The other things you can probably notice, first of all, in Row 7 I’ve lost part of the text and in all of them the text is aligned with the bottom of the cell. So for instance here, the date in Row 8 is at the bottom of


Learn Excel 2013 Row 8. Now you may not particularly want it at the bottom or you may. But I need to show you how to set that as well. And this in fact leads us to a very important aspect of formatting in a worksheet in general. When you’re formatting in a worksheet, what you’re formatting applies to is what you have selected at that time. When I set Wrap Text just now, I had Column D selected, the whole of Column D. And remember there are potentially thousands of rows in Column D. Every row in Column D has the same setting for text wrapping and that is text will wrap. If I had chosen say one cell in Column D, let’s say if I’d chosen that one I’d right clicked on that, gone into Format Cells, and for that one I had checked off Wrap Text. So I unchecked it, click on OK, and for that one cell alone text is not wrapped. Now clearly that’s not a very good solution in this case because that’s the worse cell of all and the one that needs wrapping the most. But if I select one cell or two cells or three cells and do a particular thing to them that applies to the selected cells. If I select the whole column then it will apply to every cell in the column. Let me select D again, go into Format Cells again, and if you look at Wrap Text now instead of having a tick in it or instead of being blank it’s got like a little block in it. Now when you see that it means that some cells in the selection don’t have wrapped text checked and some cells do. So what this is telling you is well within your current selection you’ve got a mixture, you’ve got some text that’s wrapped and some that isn’t. If I want to put it back so that every cell is wrapped I make sure I’ve got a tick in it and once again every cell in that column now has text wrapping switched on. Now let’s apply the same principle say to row height. With row height, everything seems fine except for row 7 where we seem to have some of the text clipped. I could just select Row 7 and then as we saw earlier on if I look on the Home tab under Format, Row Height. I could either set it manually or I could say AutoFit Row Height. Now if I’ve only got Row 7 selected and I do AutoFit Row Height, it will only adjust the row height on Row 7. So click that and that’s fixed the problem of not being able to read all of that text. Now in terms of column width, I can see that the new Column B has a problem so I’m going to select all of my columns, A to E, go into Format again, AutoFit Column Width. Now one of the important things to recognize here is that as soon as you set a text column to wrapping text, then Excel 2013 will not adjust the width of the column to accommodate the longest piece of text in © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 it. It knows that it can wrap the text so it has no need to make that column wider. It just wraps the text. So there we are. I can now read everything on this worksheet. Now I want to look at alignment generally on this worksheet. There are two forms of alignment; there is Horizontal Alignment and there is Vertical Alignment. And I’m going to deal with Vertical Alignment first, mainly because it’s a little bit easier I think. I mentioned already that if you look, for instance, at Row 7, the contents of Row 7 are bottom aligned. So within a cell where you’ve got the date here in A7 the contents are at the bottom of Cell A7. And if on the Home tab you look in the Alignment Group, you will see there is a button there, Bottom Align, which is currently the selected one. And my current selection is Row 7. So the whole of Row 7 is bottom aligned. If I took a particular Cell, say that one with the Currency amount in it, $29.50, that’s bottom aligned. If I wanted to change that particular cell to be top aligned it’s as simple as doing that. If I wanted to middle slign the whole of the row, select the row and click on Middle Align and everything is now middle aligned. So the same kinds of principle apply. There are a number of other options for alignment. One of them is to use the Dialog Box Launcher in the bottom right corner of the Alignment Group. Here if you click on that you get the Format Cells dialog with the Alignment tab selected and from here you can set the horizontal alignment and the vertical alignment. You see at the moment the vertical alignment is set to center. So what I want to do now is to set vertical alignment for the whole sheet to center or middle aligned. So select the whole sheet in the way I showed you before. We could use the button. We could use the dialog box. Let’s use the dialog box. On vertical note that’s empty. In the case of vertical alignment, that means that what you’ve got selected is a mix because at the moment some of it is bottom and some of it is middle or center. So if I select that and make it center on vertical, click on OK, and now everything is center aligned or middle aligned vertically. So now we’re going to look at horizontal alignment and this is really quite a complicated business in a way because the horizontal alignment usually depends on the type of data that you have. Let me give you a couple of specific examples. When you’re dealing with text like you’ve got in Column D there, it’s usually the case that text will be left aligned, that is that it will align


Learn Excel 2013 with the left hand edge of the column. And if you take something like the contents of Cell D8, left align means the words go Emergency Preparation and Dispatch and as soon as you get towards the right hand edge and there isn’t room to fit the next word in the next word goes on the next line, it’s left aligned, it’s hard up against that left edge, it carries on. There is another form of Alignment which is fully justified or sometimes just justified where the text is aligned with both the left and the right edge and what happens is that Excel will space out the words that are on each line to make them align with the left edge and the right edge. Now this justified alignment is very often what’s used in newspapers and so on to give nice, neat columns with both edges straight. The problem is where you’ve got narrow columns that sometimes you finish up with very big spaces between the words. So, left alignment very often looks better than fully justified. But in different situations you may want either. You may want text to be right aligned. I mean right aligned text works fine. It looks a bit strange but it can be used. So if you take this particular entry here, D8, there’s a set of horizontal alignment buttons here. Left align is what we’ve got now. Center align puts the text in the middle like that. We’re looking at D8. And right align makes it look like that. Now there are other options for the Horizontal Alignment for text. One of them being justified or what’s sometimes called fully justified. This is the sort of alignment that’s used typically in newspapers where you have say a long paragraph of text and apart from the last line for all of the other lines in the paragraph the text is aligned with both the left and the right edges of the column. And what then happens is that in order to achieve that the spaces on each of the lines in the paragraph are made bigger or smaller to make everything aligned on both sides. It leads to very neat columns of text in a newspaper but when you’re working in restricted space in a spreadsheet, it can look rather strange.

And I generally rarely used justified myself for

horizontal alignment for text. But you may well come across situations where it’s useful. And what I want to look at next then is at these numbers because by default numbers are generally right aligned in Excel. But if we go into the Dialog Box Launcher and look at alignment, what we’ll find with that number selected is that the alignment doesn’t say Right, horizontal alignment says General. And what this means and General is the horizontal alignment that Excel 2013 applies most of the time, is that Excel 2013 will align that according to a general set of rules which means that if it’s a number it will rght align it and if it’s text it will left align it. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 And for other types of data, it will align them according to its own set of rules. Now you can always override those rules by selecting a row or a column or a cell or a few cells and applying a more specific rule. So for instance on this particular cell I could say I want that to be centered. Click on OK. Now let me make Column E wider and watch what happens. Now the General Alignment, remember, is applied to all the cells except the one that I’ve got selected. And with all of the others because it’s General and because numbers and particularly Currencies are by default right aligned in Excel only that selected one is center aligned. Let’s now turn our attention back to the first column of dates. Now with the Date column, I’m going to make that quite a bit wider as well. You can see how that looks and you can see that that appears to be right Aligned. Of course, if I looked at the alignment in the Format Cells dialog, I’d see that it says General. But what if I were to change the Date Format from the one that’s applied at the moment which is that Short Date Format to this other one, the one where it says Wednesday, March 14, 2012, so the longer format. Click on OK; let’s see what happens. Still I have right alignment because that is the default here for dates. But if you look at that you may think, well, actually that looks a bit strange. You may not but you may think it looks a bit strange. But then you know now how to override that. So you could very simply say, well, how does center alignment look? Do I prefer that? Maybe that looks a bit better. What about left alignment? So you can experiment to see which one you like and it doesn’t only depend on the data type because I think if you take dates for example in the Short Date Format, right alignment looks absolutely fine whereas when you have the Long Date Format I think it’s a bit more questionable whether that looks good right aligned or not. So you absolutely should know enough now about vertical and horizontal alignment and in the next section we’re going to look at one more thing, which is merging and unmerging cells and then we’re going to start producing some nice headings and formatting of this spreadsheet. So I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Merging Cells; Applying Themes and Styles Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to finish our review of the basics of worksheet formatting. We’re, first of all, going to look at merging cells then we’re going to look at applying themes and styles to a worksheet. So let’s start with merging cells. I’ve taken then expenses information from earlier on and I’ve added some headings. I haven’t tidied the headings up at all yet. I’ve just left them pretty much as they are there. The top row is blank but what I’d like to do is to put a title right along from A to F. So that’s A1, Cell A1 to Cell F1. Now in order to do that what I can do is to merge those six cells together. If I click in the first one, drag with the mouse, and select along so that they’re all selected then on the Home tab in the Alignment Group there is a button there which is merge and center. And what this causes to happen is the selected set of cells to be merged into a single cell and for the content to be centered. Now apart from that straightforward button itself, there’s a little drop down next to it which gives us a number of other options. There’s Merge and Center, Merge Across, Merge the Cells without worrying about alignment, and then Unmerge Cells. And what I’m going to do on this occasion is just to use Merge and Center. Now with that cell still selected I can tell that it’s selected because it’s obviously got the selection rectangle around it. I can just start typing and I can say and there we are. I’ve now merged that set of six cells into one. Now note that to unmerge cells it’s pretty straightforward. If you look at this particular case, we’ve got Cells A1 to F1 merged. When they’re merged you would refer to them as A1 and if I click in A1 here, you can see that the selection marked up here in the name box in the corner is A1. To unmerge the cells all I need to do is to go back to that Menu, and on that Merge Menu, if I say Unmerge Cells watch what happens. Unmerge cells obviously unmerges the cells so I’ve now got six separate cells again. But the contents that were centered in the merged big cell become the contents of A1 because in effect it always has been the contents of A1 because the merge cell, the big cell, was A1. It was just a bigger A1. So let me undo the unmerge and go back to where we were and this is now going to be the starting point for me to format this worksheet.


Learn Excel 2013 So let’s look at column widths first. The only column width that’s likely to cause a problem really is Column F. This is a Column that indicates whether expenses are rechargeable or not and it can only have two possible values in there, Yes or No. But the heading Recharge is quite a wide heading. So with Column F selected I’m going to go into the Cells Group on the Home tab and do AutoFit Column Width. That’ll sort out that. But where we only have Yes and No, very short answers, they look at bit strange left aligned so I’m also going to center align horizontally that column. The other column that I think might cause us a problem is the Date Column because at the moment although the width of it is absolutely right for the dates that are in it I think they run into the name of the client there quite a bit. So I’m going to manually make that column a little bit wider. And the other thing and this is more of a personal preference, I prefer the date columns to be center aligned myself when they’re in Short Date Format. So I’m going to say with Column A, again, center aligned. Now generally speaking the row heights look fine. So let me now concentrate on these headings. So let’s start with this heading, this Expenses – Toby A Heading here. That cell is selected. So on the Home tab if I go to the Styles Group, select Cell Styles, then I can choose a Style which as you saw earlier on will make this spreadsheet basically theme friendly and it will make it straightforward to change the overall theme of the particular sheet. So let’s make that a Heading 1 Style. Now to see the affect of the style if I just click away from it and you can see it’s basically a white background with the selected font bold, a little bit bigger than the font in the other cells, and with that sort of blue underline. Now to see the affect of that in terms of themes if we go to the Page Layout tab, go to Themes again, as we saw earlier if I try each of the other themes I’ll see what effect that’ll have on the title. So let’s look at formatting some of the other parts of this worksheet. Let’s go back to the Home tab again. Now I’m next going to look at these headings: Date, Client, Category, Description. Generally speaking with these sort of second level headings I tend to like them centered myself and I’m trying to keep this fairly straightforward so let me select all six of those headings and I’m going to horizontally align them all in the center. So there they all are center aligned. Now let’s select them and let’s apply a Cell Style. Now let’s make these Heading Level 2 and so I’m going to go for that heading level. Again, click away and you can see the overall effect. Notice that because we made the font a little bit bigger and its bold Column F now with the word © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Recharge and the question mark is not quite wide enough. So sometimes what happens is you need to just do another little bit of AutoFit to make something continue to work. So there’s some headings. What I want to do now is I’m going to format some of the columns in different ways and I’m going to start with the date column. Now I can warn you in advance that this won’t look particularly nice but I’m trying to demonstrate the technique. So I’m going to take the Date column, in fact just the parts of the Date column, the cells in the Date column that have content in them at the moment. And then what I’m going to do is to hold the Control key down and do the same on the Category Column. Now I’ve actually now got two different sets of cells. They are non-adjacent selections but they’re both selected. Now I’m going to go to Cell Styles and on these I’m going to look at the Themed Cell Styles. Now these give me six alternatives in terms of the groups of colors. And then with each of those colors, so you’ve got a sort of green there and a sort of yellow there and a sort of orangey-red there. With each of these then you can choose the level, the depth level of the accented color. So in the case of this one, 20% Accent 1; that’s a light smattering of blue. 40% Deeper, 60% Deeper, and so on. And as you hover over them you can see obviously you’ve got the live preview there. And let’s go for this one. Let’s try the 40% on that. And as you can see if I click away to deselect, as you can see I’ve applied that cell style to both of those subsets of the columns. Now I’m pretty sure that doesn’t look particularly attractive at the moment but I’m really trying to show you what the techniques are. Now as I said this doesn’t look particularly attractive. I’m about to make it look even less attractive. What I’m going to do now is to apply some direct formatting to these two columns. So I’ve selected these cells that are currently have contents in those two columns and we’re not going to apply any formatting that is related to a theme. Now a good way of doing this is to use primarily the commands in the Font Group on the Home tab. And I can do things like, for example, change the font. So it’s currently Calibri. I could use a different font altogether. Let’s try something like Copperplate Gothic. And the other thing I can do is I can easily make the font size bigger or smaller. There is, of course, the drop down there with all the sizes on it. You see a couple of little buttons to the right, one of which we can increase the font size in little increments and another one decreases. That’s a pretty quick way of achieving the size that you want. If I wanted to change the color of the font, the color of the numbers and words in those © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 columns, click on the Font Color drop down and as with the Fill that we saw earlier on the colors, for the font are divided into Theme Colors and Standard Colors. If you use a Theme Color, it will vary with the theme. If you use a Standard Color, it won’t. So I’m going to choose this purple color here and then for the Fill I’m going to choose a Non-theme that is a Standard Color for the Fill. I’m going to use that yellow color there. And then click away so that you can see the affect of all that.

I’m pretty sure it looks fairly horrible but we’re just trying to

demonstrate how it all works. There I’ve done some direct formatting on those cells. Let’s look at the affect of all of that. Now in order for you to see the affect of all of that I’m going to make Column A quite a bit wider for the moment. You’ll see why in just a moment. Then I’m going to go to the Page Layout tab and the Themes button and I’m now going to hover over a succession of Themes and you’re looking at the Category column and the Cost and Recharge columns fonts, font sizes, and so on in each of those. So let’s go through the Themes. Let’s try the Facet Theme, the Integral Theme, Ion. Now it’s true to say that all of the formatting on Category changes, including font, color, sizes, and so on. The Cost and Recharge columns font, sizes, and so on don’t change but sometimes the spacing changes because sizes have changed elsewhere in the sheet. So even though they are effectively totally independent in terms of the font used, the Fill Color, and so on, they can still move around because of other things that are happening on the sheet depending on the selected theme. So there we are. I think you’ve seen in this section pretty much how to apply the formatting that you need. There’s only one other outstanding topic on formatting that we need to cover now. There are some others later on. And the one that’s outstanding is Borders and we’re going to look at Borders in the next section. So I’ll see you then.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Borders Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to finish off our review of the basics of formatting a worksheet and we’re going to concentrate on Borders in this section. But before we do, there’s just one other little thing I want to cover on Styles. In the previous section, we applied a style to a couple of the heading and a couple of columns on this worksheet and we also applied some direct formatting to the Cost and Recharge columns. If you want to remove a cell style, it’s pretty straightforward. Let’s take this particular one. We applied a cell style to the category cells here. If I go into the Cell Styles Command in the Styles Group on the Home tab, if at any stage you want to remove the style from a cell, all you have to do is select Normal. And when you select Normal, then the Style selection you previously applied is removed and the cell style, the default cell style is Normal. Pretty much the same as it is in a program like Word. So every cell by default has a format of Normal and you’re applying other than normal styles to achieve the sort of affects that we’ve looked at so far. The main formatting option I want to look at in this section is the use of borders and borders can provide a very good way of focusing attention on to the key points of a worksheet and also can help to segregate data and data types. If we take this particular expenses sheet that we’ve got here, if I were to select all of the cells that actually have data in them, so I’m going to start at A1, mouse down and drag down to F8. So I’ve got everything selected. I can apply a border very simply. If you look on the Home tab in the Font Group there is here a Bottom Border button or what appears to be a Bottom Border button. But if I click on the drop down, I’ll see that I actually have a whole range of border options. Now the reason that it says Bottom Border there on the button is that when you select one of the border options the one you select becomes the one on that button. It gives you a one click access to one of these many options. Now let’s look at some of the options. If I’ve got a group of cells selected which at the moment I have and I were to just click, for example, Bottom Border. Let me do that and click away. What you should be able to make out is that there is now a border but only at the bottom of the group of cells that I had selected. Let me select again. Now this time what I’m going to do is I’m going to select All Borders. Now watch what happens this time. Now again I’ll click away and you’ll now see that I have a full set of borders everywhere and this also emphasizes, of course,


Learn Excel 2013 the merged cell in the first row. So that’s basically how borders work and it shows you how straightforward it is to put borders on a selection. Now sometimes you may want something other than the default bordering that occurs with Excel 2013 and you can actually change a lot of aspects of the bordering. For example, let’s suppose that I wanted to really emphasize the Cost column here. If I select that column with its heading of Cost and go back into the drop down next to the Borders button; note the Borders button is now All Borders because that’s the last Command I executed. Click on there and this time say Thick Box Border, click away. You notice that the outer box border on those selected cells is now thicker than the others. Now with the use of the Border Tools, you can build up some pretty sophisticated borders. And there’s one particularly good way of doing this that lets you see exactly what’s going on and that is if you make a selection, I’m going to select these cells and then on the border drop down this time I’m going to go for the bottom option, More Borders. What I actually see is the Format Cells dialog, the one we’ve seen a few times before. But this time the Border tab is selected and with the Border tab, I can pretty much draw the sort of border that I want. Now if you look at that carefully at the moment you’ll see that I’ve got a thick Border on the right, yep because that’s the one that butts up to cost which has got a thicker border. And the border everywhere else is the same. Now supposing I was going to make that vertical inner border there a dashed line what I would do is if I choose one of the patterns, one of the styles of line over here, what about that dashed dot line? That one and then click on this vertical line in the little picture, that becomes a dotdash line. If with the horizontal line I select that that will also be a dot-dash line. If I wanted to make the left hand line thick choose a thick line, click on the left hand line there, and the buttons around the edge give me toggles. So if for instance I wanted to toggle on and off the bottom border, bear in mind that I’ve still got this thick line selected. If I click once now I get the thick line at the bottom. If I click it again, I have no line at the bottom at all. So you can see how I’ve drawn a much more sort of complex Border pattern using this approach. Click on OK, click away, and you’ll see the sort of border pattern that I’ve got now. I’ve got the dash-dotted lines horizontally and vertically inside, thick on the left and right. The right one carried over from the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 cost here. And no Border line at all at the bottom. Now you should be able to see from that, that with a little bit of judicious use of that dialog, you can achieve pretty much any pattern of borders that you want. Now before we move on I just want to point out a couple of things in relation to touch. The use of touch for all of this is pretty much the same; you do all the same kinds of things. Because you may well be using the commands on the Ribbon quite a bit more you may want to use that option of spacing the Ribbon. So you go up to the button on the Quick Access Toolbar that lets you switch between the two, go for the Touch option, space everything out. You can now get to buttons like the ones in the Alignment Group more easily. If you look at the Category Column where the word Travel is in Row 7 it’s become bottom aligned again somehow. I think my finger must have slipped at some stage. That’s the sort of thing that can happen from time to time. Select that cell just by touching it to select it. You can see the selection box around it and then for vertical alignment, you just tap the vertical alignment, the middle alignment bottom in the Alignment Group to restore that to Middle Alignment. And then pretty much everything else you might want to do you can do with your fingers. So if you wanted to change the border on that click the drop down and perhaps you could say Thick Box Border and having the wider settings will really help you to use touch to achieve the same kinds of effect on a touch device. The other thing to remember, of course, whenever you’re working with this, if you’re going for a particular cell like that one for instance, if you touch it bring up the mini toolbar, you can access things like Font, Fill, Clear, and so on. And then, of course, you have the drop down at the right with various other commands on it as well. So the touch equivalent of these pretty much follows the same pattern. So now here’s something for you to do. This is Example 2 from the worksheets that you got with the course. What I want you to do is on Sheet 1 where we have these Opening Hours where you should already have changed some of the content, so you should be looking at 24 hour clock for example. What I’d like you to try to do is to format this a little bit better. I don’t want you to add any data at this stage; we’ll be doing that a little bit later on. But I would like you to make the sheet theme-compatible, so it’s theme sympathetic if you like. So let’s not have any direct formatting, do everything according to the styles available in each of the themes. And also add a border or some borders in some way that brings out the structure of this data. Now that’s © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Example 2 and when you’ve had a go at it, if you want to see what I did with it take a look at Example 3. That’s it for this section. We finished now with the basics of formatting a Worksheet. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 10 – Copy, Paste and Paste Special Video: Copy, Cut and Paste Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Copy, Cut, and Paste. If you’re familiar with Windows applications, I’m sure you will have used Copy, Cut, and Paste quite a bit before. There are a few very specific things in relation to Excel that you need to know about though because with Excel, particularly when you come to paste something there are various things that you might or might not want to paste as you are doing it. And in this section, we’re going to start to look at some of the complications of Copy, Cut, and Paste as they appear in Excel 2013. Now the first thing to note about Cut, Copy, and Paste in Excel 2013 is that you can Cut, Copy, and Paste various things. You can Cut, Copy, and Paste a worksheet in a workbook. In fact, if you go into File Explorer in Windows 8 for example, you could copy and paste a whole workbook. But within a workbook, within a worksheet, you can copy and paste columns, cells, whole sheets. You can copy and paste part of the contents of a cell. So for instance, let’s suppose I select these five cells here. Then on the Home tab in the Clipboard Group, there are three enabled buttons. The top one is Cut, the next one is Copy, and the next one is Format Painter. I’ll come back to Format Painter a little bit later on. Copy is the one we’re going to use first. Click on Copy and what we’ve now copied to the Clipboard is those five cells. Not just the content of the five cells but the fact that they are five cells. Now once you’ve copied a selection like this, you can see what some people call the marching ants around that selection just to remind you what you’ve copied. And if I now select five cells elsewhere in the same worksheet and click the Paste button, note that once I’ve done a Copy, the Paste button is enabled. I will paste those five cells into a new position. Now notice that in pasting them, Excel has made the fifth row taller to accommodate the taller content in the fifth cell. So that’s a very basic Copy and Paste. Now look at the original five cells. I’ve still got the marching ants. That’s still the selection. I could paste the same selection elsewhere. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to paste them into the Cost column. Now when you’re pasting if you’ve got, as we have in this case, a number


Learn Excel 2013 of cells selected. Here we’ve got five cells. You don’t really need to select five cells to paste into. You can just select a first cell. And if I now click on Paste, watch what happens with just that one cell selected. Now what happens is it pastes in those five cells but it won’t make the column width wider in this case. So in order to accommodate the text it’s wrapping the text in every one of the cells. Now exactly what it will and won’t do in terms of whether it will make a column wider, whether it will make a row taller, and so on largely depends both on the current situation in terms of what’s on the worksheet you’re working in and on the formatting that you’re using. And I’m going to explain some of those during the rest of this section. Now let me go back to my original selection of five cells and this time instead of doing copy, I’m going to do Cut. So I use the Cut symbol there in the Clipboard Group on the Home Tab, do a Cut, still see the marching ants. This time I’m going to select that cell there and again, Paste is enabled. Click on Paste and those five cells are cut. Now there’s no problem with the five cells going to their new location. The difference, of course, with the Cut is that they have left their previous location and therefore they are no longer selected. Once you’ve done a Cut and Paste, the selection has gone. And one thing to note after that paste is that the Paste symbol in the Clipboard Group on the Home tab is now grayed out, which means you cannot paste again until you copy or cut something else to the Clipboard. Now you should be aware of the well-known keyboard shortcuts in Windows for Cut, Copy, and Paste. They’re exactly the same in Excel. So Cut is Control and X, Copy is Control and C, Paste is Control and V. So if I for instance, I wanted to take the last five cells that I’ve pasted, those five, to cut them using the keyboard shortcut is Control-X. And if I wanted to put them back where they were originally select the first cell, Control-V to paste, and those cells are pasted back into their original location. So when you have the marching ants, when you have a set of cells selected to cancel the selection just press the Escape key. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to make a different selection and I’m going to talk about the various types of paste that we can do. So I’m going to select these cost figures. Now there are six cells. They’re now selected. So now I will copy them and I’m going to paste them just into this position here. Now watch carefully what happens as I paste. After the paste in the bottom right hand corner, there’s a little thing called a Smart © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Tag and that Smart Tag corresponds to paste options. And if you click on the drop down, you’ll see a number of Paste options. Now some of them have run off the bottom of the screen. Don’t worry too much about that because we’ll come back to those in a moment. And within the Paste options, there are several versions of paste. Now by default it does a straightforward paste. The second option is it pastes formulas. We’re going to look at formulas and pasting formulas later in the course.

This one says Formulas and Number Formatting; this one, Keep source

formatting. This one No Borders. This one, Keep source column widths. This one, Transpose. So if I’ve copied a row, I want to paste as a column. So for instance, if I selected that one look what happens is I actually finish up with the numbers across the page. There are many, many options for this and I’m certainly not going to go through all of them on this course, but as you can see there are plenty of them there for you to look at. And sometimes things like being able to copy a row and paste it as a column or vice versa can be very useful operations. Now in this section I’m really going to concentrate on a couple of those key Copy and Paste combinations and I’m going to leave you to experiment with the others. So the list of options that we saw just then on that Smart Tag let me just go back to doing the same thing again. I’ve copied that list of costs. I’m going to select a cell down here. If you go up to the Paste button in the Clipboard Group and click on the drop down, you’ll actually see that list of options up here. It’s the same list that you get with the Smart Tags and you can do things like, for example, if you choose Paste Values you don’t paste the formatting, you just paste the values. So if I clicked that I would get these strange numbers. Now the thing that’s happened here is because it hasn’t even pasted the format for those, so it hasn’t even said that these are Currency values, Excel 2013 has interpreted those numbers in a default kind of way. Now the way that’s it done it may seem rather strange to you, but bear in mind that when it does Date Formats, it actually does Date Formats on the basis of the number of days since January the 1st 1900. And it’s coming up with values like this, 1/18/1900 which probably looks a really strange thing to you because if you count 18 units, what was $18.90, 18 units from January 1, 1900 you get January the 18th 1900. Now obviously that’s not at all what you’d intended, but when you do paste the values it takes just the numbers and it interprets them in whatever way it wants to at that time. Now, of course, we could work out why it’s interpreted those as dates but it doesn’t really matter. The key point is that we haven’t pasted any of the formatting at all, not the Font, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 not the Font size, not the background Color, the Fill Color, not even the fact that they’re Currency Values. We’ve just pasted the numbers. Now, of course, that sort of thing will happen to you from time to time when you’re doing Copy, Cut, Paste in Excel and you should by now be able to fix that sort of problem quite easily. They’ve come through as dates. If I select those cells and go on to Format Cells, I can see yes it’s definitely interpreted them as dates. If I just click on Number, check the number of decimal places. Yeah I’ll stick with two decimal places, maybe a thousand separators. Click on OK and, of course, the numbers come through just as straightforward numbers, not as Currency but as you can see the numbers are the correct numbers. So let’s look at something now which is pretty much the sort of opposite of that. Let’s suppose that I particularly like the formatting of a range of cells here. I’ve got six cells here with the dates and I really like that Layout and I want to apply it over here. Now, of course, the issue here is that the format I’ve got is a combination of the coloring, the font, the font size, and so on and the actual Number Format; in this case the contents of the cells are dates, over here they’re Currency. Now one thing you can do is if you select a set of cells. Let me suppose I select those then I can use the Format Painter. If I click on the Format Painter, it copies everything to do with the formats. And if I then brush over the same six cells over here, release the mouse, I’ve applied that format. Now the format that I’ve applied is not only the color scheme, the font, the font size, and so on but also the Number Format. So it’s actually made these into dates. But, of course, I can select these and if I right click here, Format Cells, choose Currency, make sure I’ve got the U.S. dollar sign, two decimal places, click on OK, and I’ve basically applied the formatting of that column to this column. Now the examples I’m choosing here are obviously relatively straightforward. Small numbers of cells so that you can see them all on the screen at once. But this can be a really time saving way of doing things because what will often happen that you’ll arrive at the formatting of a column or a row or a group of cells with quite a lot of experimentation, maybe different color schemes, font sizes, effects like bold and italic, and it might be quite a challenge to work out all exactly the same steps again to apply to a different range of cells. So once you’ve got a format that you like it can be really helpful to be able to Copy and Paste that format even if part of it, as in this case changing dates back to Currency, you have to do manually; most of it is a pretty straightforward Copy and Paste operation. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Now one thing I should point out about Format Painter is that you can use it in multiple places and you don’t need to match the number of cells that you’re copying the format from and pasting to. So the way I could very easily have done the example that I just used, if you select one cell with the format you like and then double click Format Painter, you can then effectively paint it as many times as you like. So use it once, again, again, again, go somewhere else altogether if I like. So that’s the way that you can use Format Painter repetitively. Again, that can be a great time saver. And then when you’ve finished, all you’ve got to do is to press the Escape key to cancel the format painting operation. Now so far I’ve concentrated on copying, cutting, pasting, format painting groups of cells. But sometimes you’re going to need to copy and paste columns and rows and I want to demonstrate one or two things about copying and pasting columns and rows very quickly. I’m going to demonstrate with one or two rows. If I for example wanted to put another cab fare row in here and I was feeling a bit lazy and I thought, oh, I’ll just Copy and Paste this one. If I copy Row 5 by selecting it and then I can use the keyboard shortcut Control-C to copy the row. If I were to then say select Row 8 and paste it, so do Control-V, of course, that overrides Row 8 and the original Row 8 is gone and okay I’ve made a copy of Row 5 but at the cost of deleting the original Row 8, which is probably not what I’d intended. So let me undo that. I’ve still got Row 5 copied. If on the other hand I right click with Row 8 selected one of the options on the contextual menu is Insert Copied Cells. Now an Insert is different from a paste and generally speaking when you’re dealing with rows and columns in Excel 2013, if you’re trying to make additional rows or columns by using existing ones paste is generally destructive if you’ve got something selected. Whereas if you do Insert, it isn’t. So if I do Insert Copied Cells now, watch what happens. I finish up with a copy of Row 5 but I’ve still got the original Row 8, of course, its Row 9 now. So that’s something to be very careful of. The same thing applies with columns. If I copy that column, don’t forget there’s a copy on the contextual menu, then if I select Column F, right click, Insert Copied Cells, it inserts a new column to the left of the selected column. So that’s something to be very careful of when you’re dealing with copying, cutting, and pasting and inserting rows and columns in Excel 2013. Now we will be getting a lot of Copy, Cut, and Paste practice in the rest of this course, but I would like to mention one other thing and that is if you’ve used similar Windows Programs © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 before, particularly if you’ve used Office Programs before, then you’ll be familiar with the Paste Special dialog. If I’ve got a particular cell or range of cells such as this one copied and the Paste is enabled, if you click on the button underneath, right at the bottom Paste Special, and you have the Paste Special dialog which you can think of as a sort of alternative to all the separate little buttons that are available now in Excel 2013. So you have some options up here where you can say I want to Paste All. I want to Paste Formulas, Values, Formats, Comments, etc; quite a few different options there. You can also say I want to skip any blanks and I want to transpose. That’s how you switch columns for rows, rows for columns. It’s really an alternative approach that some people prefer. So that’s the Paste Special dialog. That is it on Copy, Cut, and Paste for now. As I said we’ll be getting some more practice later in the course. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 11 – Proofing Video: Spell checking Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at checking spelling. Now although a lot of your Excel Spreadsheets will be mainly populated with numbers, on many occasions you’ll also have a lot of words as well and it’s therefore very important to be able to check the spelling in the work that you’ve done. Now in order to demonstrate the checking of spelling in Excel 2013, I’ve used one of the standard templates, a personal cash flow template, and I’ve put into that a few spelling mistakes, different types of spelling mistakes although I should say spelling mistakes that demonstrate different points about the Excel 2013 spell checker. Now, first of all, there are a couple of areas where we first of all need to check and possibly change the Excel options related to spell checking; so into Backstage View and click on Options. Now for the spell checking aspects of Excel 2013, you need to go to the Proofing tab. And in the Proofing tab, we’ve got two sections really. One section is AutoCorrect Options which is an area I’m going to come back to a little bit later on in this section. And then we have the main section of options when correcting spelling in Microsoft Office Programs. Now you’ve got a number of options here, some of them you really need to be careful about; some of them you may need to experiment with first. But the first one, for example, is “Ignore words in upper case.” So if I’ve got a word somewhere which is in upper case do not check the spelling. This is very often the case if you’re dealing say with something like part numbers or technical information where you have sequences of upper case characters but they’re not meant to represent words, normal words in the language that you use. Similarly with the second option, “Ignore words that contain numbers.” It’s very often the case again with something like part numbers or references, bank account numbers, that sort of thing that you’ll have things that could be taken for words but anything that’s got numeric digits in it is not a word. So there’s a set of these here that are worth checking. Another one in the middle there, “Flag repeated words”; if you see the same word twice in a row, just flag the fact that that’s happened. Now with the setting at the bottom, we have Dictionary language. That’s a very important one to get right. Mine is currently set to English United Kingdom, but really for the purposes of this section, I’m going to change it to the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 other one I use most of the time which is English United States. There’s then some information related to French modes and Spanish modes and you can in fact setup custom dictionaries. If you say have Excel Workbooks that relate to very specific kinds of sets of words, so you have perhaps an unusual language in them, you maybe have some lists of proper names that you use in some situations. Then you may want to setup a custom dictionary to use for spell checking. I’m going to leave that at the moment and I’m just going to concentrate on the options that I’ve set here. And as I said just now I’ll come back to AutoCorrect a little bit later on. So click OK. Now this particular workbook has four worksheets. You can see the names of the worksheets at the bottom: Guide, Annual Cash Flow, Monthly Cash Flow. I’ve currently got the Guide Worksheet selected. If you have a single cell selected on a worksheet and you start spell checking then Excel 2013 will check the spelling on the whole of that worksheet. If on the other hand you have say several cells selected, it will only check the spelling in the cells you have selected. Now I’m not going to go into this now, but if you’re partway through entering data in the formula bar, you can actually just spell check all or part of what’s in the formula bar. But for the moment, I’m going to restrict to checking spelling on the sheet. And by having just one cells selected when I check spelling, it will check the whole of this worksheet. So the tab we need on the Ribbon is Review and on the Review tab right over on the left we’ve got Proofing, and the first button over there is Spelling. Now note with Spelling there’s a keyboard shortcut of F7 and you’ll probably find that’s one of the ones you tend to remember to check spelling. So that’s F7. Click on Spelling. Now, it says spell check complete. You’re good to go. That means that on this sheet it found no errors at all, which is good news. And that’s what you hope to find when you spell check a worksheet. So that’s great. Click on OK for that one. Now let’s move on to the second worksheet. Now let’s try spell checking this sheet. This time I’m going to use the keyboard shortcut of F7 and this time it seems to have found a mistake. It says, “Not in dictionary.” And it’s got R-IS-E-RV-E-S, Riserves. Now if I move the little dialog around I should be able to find out where it says that. And you can see there’s an obvious spelling mistake there. That should say Cash Reserves with an E. Now when it finds what it thinks is a mistake, it will normally make suggestions about what the correct word might be. And if you see that one of those suggestions is the word © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 you want and in this case I realized the word I want is Reserves, then I can substitute just by saying use this word, and to do that I say Change. Now if in fact, it found what it suspected was a spelling mistake and of the suggestions that it made there wasn’t one that was the correct suggestion, I could actually type over what’s in the word at the top there. Reserves. I could actually type in there what the word should be. Obviously, I’m going to put the right word in here. And then typing in the correct word and then just say Change, watch what happens on the sheet. And you can see that the correction has been made on the sheet. When you make a change what will normally happen is it will go to the next suspected spelling mistake on the same sheet. So what it’s done here is its gone straight down to the next entry which says, 401K/Etc, Etcetera. And what it says here, Etc is not in my dictionary. I think what you meant is Etc-dot. Now this is a somewhat stylistic question here because some people always put the dot at the end of etcetera and some people don’t. Let’s suppose that you decide, well, I’m not bothered about putting a dot there, everybody knows what I mean by Etc. You can ignore that and you can just say look at the button at the top right, Ignore once. So you’re saying, yep, I see what you mean but I don’t care. I’m going to leave it at Etc. You might also say to yourself, well yeah, I’m happy with Etc but I’ve used that all over the place on this worksheet so this is going to happen time and time again. So you can say second button down on the right, Ignore all, and that will mean that you’re saying wherever you see it say Etc just ignore it. I know you want me to say Etc. but I’m happy with Etc; so I will say Ignore all. Now it comes down to the next one. The next spelling mistake Charty. Now that should be, well, that should be Charity. Look at the suggestions. Cherty is the first one. It’s not that. Charity, that’s the one I want. I’m picking one from the list and I say Change. And now it says, “Do you want to continue checking at the beginning of this sheet?” Although I didn’t point it out there, when we started checking this particular sheet we had a cell in the middle selected. And Excel 2013 always starts spell checking at the cell you’ve got selected. So when it gets to the end of the sheet it says, “Do you want to go back and start at the beginning again?” I’ll say Yes and now it says “Spell check complete.” That’s good. You’re good to go. Okay so now you should have the general idea of that. I just want to demonstrate one other sheet. Go to Daily Cash Flow. I’m going to do the same thing again. I’m going to go Review, Spelling. On this occasion it finds a word, the word is Swiftcover all in one word. Now, in fact,


Learn Excel 2013 Swiftcover is a valid word because it’s a proper name. It’s the name of an insurance company. And Swiftcover Insurance which is the entry that it’s flagged this problem in is absolutely fine because Swiftcover is a real word. If I want to keep that so that it doesn’t flag that as a spelling mistake in future, I can click on “Add to Dictionary.” And if I add that word to my dictionary whatever else I’m doing in the future when I’m using this dictionary, even if I’m checking a completely different workbook, then because that word is in my dictionary if I’m using that dictionary, then that will be treated as a valid word. So if I want to add that to dictionary I say “Add to dictionary.” That one’s now accepted. It’s now found Home Improvments. Ah, that’s a regular kind of spelling mistake. I’ll just say Change for that one. There’s Etcetera again. I’ll Ignore all on Etcetera. And there we are. Do you want to continue checking at the beginning of the sheet? Yes. Spell check complete. You’re good to go. So there we are. My spell checking is all done. So there’s just one other thing to mention here. I need to go back to the Options and talk to you about AutoCorrect options which I mentioned right near the beginning of this section. You can tell Excel 2013 to correct common typing mistakes as you enter data, and this is what AutoCorrect means. Click on AutoCorrect Options from the Proofing tab in Excel Options. That brings up this little dialog and it will be set according to your locale. And then you have a number of options that you can choose between. Now to some extent these depend on your own style, your own requirements. But for instance, if you look at this first tab, AutoCorrect, Correct two initial capitals. Do you commonly accidentally type two initial capitals? If you do you can tell Excel 2013 to correct that for you to replace each of the two capitals with a single capital. If you commonly deal with data where two initial capitals are valid you wouldn’t want this option set. But the options here are the typical typing mistakes that people make. So we have things like capitalize the first letter of sentences. You can say to Excel I’m just going to type, you put capitals on the first letter of each sentence. Do you want to capitalize the names of days? So whenever I type the word Monday do I want a capital M?

Now there are also various

replacement categories. So take that for instance, if I type open bracket-C-close brackets that becomes a copyright symbol. There’s a whole list of those and you can obviously enter your own by putting Replace with entries in there. And then AutoFormat as you type, Actions, Math AutoCorrect, etc. There’s a whole set of those. Obviously, the settings you want will depend on


Learn Excel 2013 you. You have the ability here to define exceptions. So if you want to use AutoCorrect and I tend to use AutoCorrect, you need to tune that and select the options there that suit both the way you do things and the particular situation you’re in regarding what sort of data you type into your spreadsheets anyway. So that’s spell checking. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 12 – Managing Worksheets Video: Moving, Copying, Inserting, Deleting and Locking Sheets; Multiple Worksheets Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at managing worksheets and we’re going to start using our Table of Expenses which is a single worksheet in an Excel 2013 workbook. And what we’re going to do is to change this workbook so that it has multiple worksheets. Now before we start, I’d like to point out something about working in Excel 2013 that you will have realized already and that is that there’s usually more than one way of doing things. If for instance you wanted to format a cell, you will have seen that you’ve got things like the contextual menu, you’ve got the mini toolbar. You’ve maybe got two or three options on one or more tabs of the Ribbon to achieve the affect that you want. And so far as we’ve been going through the course, I’ve pointed out one or two, sometimes three ways of doing something, but there are usually others as well. You may also have noticed that as far as the Ribbons concerned we’ve only looked at a couple of the tabs on it and the majority of the tabs on it we haven’t even opened and looked at yet; although we will be looking at all of them during the rest of the course. Now in talking about managing worksheets, it’s another good example of how we can use one approach to getting at the commands that we need but there are many others and not all of them we’ll be covering in the course. Some of them you’ll perhaps stumble across yourself later or you may look for a better approach or you may speak to somebody else and they may tell you that there is a different or sometimes better way of doing things. The important point is if you experiment with these, you will usually find the way that suits you the best. And the way that I’m showing you to do things on this course so far is often the best way but more often it’s the way that I think for people who are new to Excel is the easiest way to follow. There are various shortcuts and workarounds and so on that I use in my day to day use of Excel that I haven’t covered here because they’d perhaps be a bit confusing if you’re still new to Excel and you’re just trying to get your head around exactly what it does and how it works, etc. Now as the course progresses, I will try to introduce a few of those little shortcuts, a few of those little tricky ways of doing things that you may find save you time or make things easier in the long run. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So somewhat in that spirit let’s look at this workbook which has a single sheet in it. The single sheet contains some of Toby A’s expenses on a business trip. What are we going to do with this workbook is we’re going to make it a sort of workbook with a number of employee’s expenses in it. And initially it’s only going to have two employee’s expenses. But it’s also going to have an information sheet at the back. So we’re going to finish up with three worksheets in this workbook. We’re going to finish up with a worksheet for Toby A, a worksheet for Simone C, and then a sort of key at the back. And the key will contain things like the list of available categories: Travel, Entertainment, Subsistence, Office. Now in order to do that, what we’re going to do is to use one specific approach and that is we’re going to look at the tab at the bottom of the current worksheet and right click and use that contextual menu. So let’s look at the items on the contextual menu. We have Insert which enables us to insert a new sheet. We have delete which enables us to delete the selected sheet. Rename which as the name implies enables you to rename a sheet. Move or Copy which enables us to move or copy the selected sheet; we can move it either to another position in the current workbook or in fact can move it to another workbook. As we’ll see later on in the course it’s quite possible to have two or more workbooks open and, in that case, you can move worksheets between workbooks. You can also make a copy either to another position in this workbook or to another open workbook. View code enables you to look at the VBA Code, the program code that you can attach to a worksheet. Now we don’t cover coding in this basic course. But with coding you can put together very specific and very individual behavior for your workbook and your worksheets. Protect Sheet; we will look at later on in the course. This is a way of protecting your sheet so that you can either stop people from changing it or even in some cases stop people from seeing your sheet. Tab Color enables you to change the color of the worksheet tab itself. I’ll show you that in a moment. Hide, well, I think you can probably guess what Hide does. That enables you to hide a sheet. And Select All Sheets enables you to select all sheets in the workbook. So let’s try one or two of those out. Let’s start by renaming the sheet. So right click, click on Rename, and what you’ll see is that the current name, Sheet 1, is highlighted and you should just about be able to see that there is a cursor flashing to the right of Sheet 1, and that indicates where we will type if we start typing. Now I want to delete the whole of the current name so all I need to do as the current name is selected is to press any character on the keyboard, either the real © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 keyboard or my virtual keyboard, what’s there is deleted, put in the name that I want. I’m going to make it TobyA, press Enter, and my sheet has been renamed. Okay, now I’m going to make a copy of that sheet for the second employee, Simone C. So right click on the Tab, click on Move or Copy, and it brings up this little Move or Copy dialog. Now the Move or Copy dialog has effectively three things where you have to make a decision. First of all, which Book? Now if you’ve only got one workbook open, then you’ll only be able to copy it into that one workbook, but you can say New Book and New Book will open a New Book for you and put either this sheet or a copy of this sheet into a new book. So that’s a pretty useful option. I’m going to stick with the current book which is called Book5D. Then, I say where do I want it? Do I want it before Sheet TobyA or do I want it at the end? Move to end. Now I’m going to put this at the end. And the third option is and this is what differentiate a move from a copy is do I want to move it or do I want to copy it? Now, in this case, I want a copy so I’m going to click on Copy, click on OK, and I’ve now got a second sheet. Now notice the name of the worksheet. The name of the worksheet is TobyA with a 2 in brackets. I’m going to change the name. So I’m going to do right click, Rename, type as before, SimoneC, press Enter, and I’ve got my second worksheet. Now one of the things about doing this with a copy is that when I make a copy of a Worksheet I get all of the content as well. So by copying the TobyA Sheet, I’m renaming SimoneC, the rename doesn’t affect the content of the sheet. So I’ve still got all of Toby’s expenses. So let’s suppose I now want to set this up for Simone. I’m going to click into Cell A1 which is the header; in the formula bar it says Expenses – Toby A. If I click in the formula bar, delete the name, and instead put in the name Simone C, then I’m now starting to personalize this sheet to my second employee. Now the other thing to note is that the expenses that currently are in here for Toby will clearly not be the same expenses as for Simone. So what I’m going to do now is to clear the contents of all of these expenses. But I’m going to do this using touch. So if I were going to clear all of those expense entries using keyboard and mouse I would select them all and press the Delete key. The approach with touch is pretty similar. Tap on A3, ignore the mini toolbar for the moment, drag by the bottom right hand corner to make the selection


Learn Excel 2013 complete. Now tap again within that area to bring up the mini toolbar and then all you need to do is to tap on Clear and it’s all cleared. Now in fact the entry for Simone C would actually be a much better one for creating a further copy because we’ve cleared the expenses entries for Toby. So supposing I wanted to make a third employee sheet. So right click on Simone C, Move or Copy. Now I’m going to make a copy so let’s do that first. I’m going to stick in the same book. I’m going to move this copy before Toby A. So I’m going to click on OK, look what happens, I get a further copy. It gets that default name of SimoneC (2). Of course, I could rename it. If I wanted to put these in a different order, I could use the Move Command to move them about.

But there’s a good

alternative when you want to change the order and that is that if you select one of the tabs you can drag it into the position you want it. So for instance, I can move the tabs around, worksheets around like this. And finally on this if I wanted to just get rid of one of these, remember I said at the beginning that I only wanted two employee tabs for their expenses, if I right click on SimoneC (2) and click on Delete, I’m asked to confirm. You can’t undo deleting sheets. So this is a very important confirmation. Click on Delete and that one’s gone. Now the third sheet that I want in this workbook is nothing like the other two. It’s not an expenses sheet for a third employee. It’s a sort of key. It’s probably the key that I will let employee’s use to notify them of things like the categories of expense that are available. So there’s really no benefit in making a copy of one of the existing worksheets to create the third one. So what I’m going to do is to insert a new worksheet. Now there are a couple of ways of doing this. In fact, there are more than two ways of doing it, but you may recall that if we right click on one of these tabs we see Insert. And if you click on Insert, you see this Insert dialog in which worksheet is already selected. Now you can insert several other things at this point. I’m not going to go into that now, but if worksheet is selected and you click on OK, you get a new worksheet. And it will be given a default name which obviously then you can rename and then you can put whatever information you want to put on this sheet. Now in this case, what I was going to use this sheet for is to make a list of the categories that are available. So I might say there right here are the categories. We know that one of them is Entertainment. So I can put all © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 of those in. I can select that Column, AutoFit Column Width, etc., maybe make that heading bold. And I can put in all the available categories and say to the employee’s when they’re filling in their sheets, use this key and make sure that you only ever include category entries from this list. Now one important thing to recognize here although we won’t be covering it on this course is that you can actually automate this workbook using the sort of code that I mentioned a little while ago to say that when employee’s are for instance entering expenses. Let’s go back to Toby’s Sheet. When he’s selecting a category here, you could actually offer him a list of the available categories and only let him choose from that list. And the list itself could be derived from the list on this key sheet here. So you can pretty much lock down the categories that the employee’s use. But that’s, that’s beyond the scope of this course. Now one important thing to notice there as well is that when I did the Insert, I actually right clicked on SimoneC and the Insert when you do that will be to the left of the selected tab, so the selected existing worksheet. There’s a little plus button just here to the right of the tabs and this is a New Worksheet button. Click on that and you get a new worksheet again to the left of the selected tab. So that’s another way of doing exactly the same thing. Now I don’t need the second one so I’m going to right click and delete it. I’m going to rename Sheet 1 and call it Key, press Enter. And for TobyA right click, Tab Color. I’m going to choose a Theme Color. I’m going to choose that Theme Color. SimoneC, again Tab Color, same Theme Color for SimoneC. Key, Tab Color, let’s choose that tab color for the Key. I’m going to drag the Key to be right at the end and there I’ve got slightly more nicely formatted tabs for the worksheets in my workbook. And of course, as you’ll realize by now if I change the Theme, so if I go up to Page Layout, Themes, watch at the tabs as I change theme, the tabs will change with the theme as well. So, that is it on managing worksheets at the moment. And we’re going to be doing quite a lot in the rest of the course. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 13 – Comments Video: Inserting Comments Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Comments. When you’re working with a particularly complex worksheet or sometimes even with a relatively straightforward worksheet, there may be an additional explanation of something that you may want to add. This is very often the case when we get on to complex calculations using formulae and functions, which we’re going to look at later on in the course. But even with something fairly straightforward like expenses here the employee that’s filling in the form may want to add an explanatory note about something. And often the best way to do that is by using a comment. So let’s suppose that Toby A wants to add a note about dinner with local agent here. And the way to do that is to select the cell and then on the Review tab, we’ve all ready seen Spelling on the Review tab but there is also a section called Comments. Click on New Comment and you can type in a new comment.

Now assuming that you’ve assigned a user name on your

installation of Excel 2013 for you as a user, mine is Toby Arnott. You’re name is put on the comment. One of the ways that people use comments is that people can look at each other’s comments.

This is particularly useful when you’re, say, developing a workbook or when

different people use it and have different responsibilities in a workbook and it helps them explain things to other users of the same workbook. Now on this occasion Toby’s going to put a note in here and when his boss comes to review his expenses worksheet he can look at the comment that Toby has put in here. So let’s put a comment in. Okay. And when Toby has added the comment, all he’s got to do is to click anywhere else in the worksheet for the comment to be closed. Now the way that we know there is a comment in the cell is that there is a tiny little red marker in the top right hand corner and if you hover over the cell, also the comment pops up. Let’s now suppose that Toby wants to add a second comment.

This time where it says

“Emergency preparation and dispatch of client samples to head office.” If I click on that I don’t actually have to use the Review tab. If you right click, one of the options is Insert Comment. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Click on Insert Comment; you have exactly the same procedure. And again click outside to hide that comment. And you can see the little red marker on both of the cells that have comments in. Now just take a look at the Review tab. If I click on one of the cells that don’t have a comment, that one for example, in the Comments Group on the Review tab I have a New Comment button. Delete is grayed out, of course, and I have Previous and Next. I’ll come to those in a moment. Whereas if I click on one of the cells that does have a comment already, such as that one, you see the content of the Comments Group changes; it’s context sensitive.

I now have an Edit

Comment button. And if I click on Edit Comment, it’ll let me go it, cursor in there to edit the comment. Also, again, if I select that I have the option to delete the comment as well. Now let me talk a little about a situation where you have a number of comments on a sheet. And perhaps they’re comments written by somebody else; you want to quickly go through them or review them all, maybe even comment on the comments yourself. In the Comments Group on the Review tab, one of the buttons there is Next. I’ve actually got the cursor right at the beginning of this sheet. If I click on Next, it takes me to the next comment. The next comment I can see the little arrow from the corner of the comment showing which cell it applies to. Next takes me to the next one. And then, of course, Previous will take me back again. If at any time I want to change to showing or hiding a comment, bear in mind that what you’ve seen so far has meant that you see the comments when you’re hovering over the cell or when the cell is selected. If you want to determine manually when you show and hide comments, you can use this button in the Comments Group, Show or Hide the comment on the active cell. So if I make that the active cell, click, it hides it, click, it shows it. And, of course, whether I hover over or not the comment is still shown. And if I want to show all comments, click on Show All Comments and I’ll see them all. So that’s pretty much it on comments for now. But now I want to give you your next exercise. If you want to get a little bit of practice, open Example 3 which is one of the examples provided with this course and I want you to make a few changes this time. What we have here is how we left it last time. It’s got the opening hours for the year 2013 on it. I want you to rename the tab for this worksheet to say 2013 as the year. And I also want you to make a copy, a second


Learn Excel 2013 worksheet for 2014. So we’re starting to work on the opening hours for 2014. Now I want you then on the 2014 sheet to make some plan changes on the times. During the week, that’s Monday through Friday, the opening time is going to be 30 minutes later each day, but on Sunday the closing time is also going to be half an hour later. I then also want you to put a comment on the Saturday closing time to say that the Saturday closing time needs to be reviewed before these opening hours are published. And finally, I want a note, not a comment. I actually want this entered as text. Take these three cells here, merge them, and enter as left justified text a note to the effect that visitors should always check online for latest opening times before visiting or they can call customer services on 555-2324. So there are quite a few things for you to do there. When you’ve had a go at that, whether you get some problems with it or not, have a look at Example File 4 which is my version of the answer to all of those questions. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 14 – Viewing and Printing Video: Workbook Views, Zoom and Freeze Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at the options for viewing worksheets. If we go to the View tab on the Ribbon, you’ll see that in the left group, Workbook Views Group, the Normal button is selected and Normal View is the one we’ve used pretty much all the time so far. But there are other views available and within each of those there are other options that we can select from. So let’s see what views are available in Excel 2013. Well, first of all, let’s look at the other two main views that are available. One of them is Page Break View. Now Page Break View is one which only shows the cells on the worksheets in our workbook that have content, but it shows how if we were to print them with the current settings the contents would break over pages. Now if you look at this particular example what you may just be able to make out there is a vertical blue dashed line. And what that means is that if I were to just print this workbook with the current settings, the pages would break where that blue dashed line is. Now, of course, I can adjust the settings and I could overcome that and I could fit all of this data on to one page print. But this only relates to the current settings. Now it’s well worth knowing that you can actually work in Page Break View if you want to. You could actually adopt this as your working view. You could add and edit data and do pretty much everything you can do in Normal View using Page Break View. And I’ll return to that in just a moment. The other main view is what’s called Page Layout View. And if I click on Page View Layout View, what you see, again, you’ll see the data but you’ll see it as it would appear printed on a page but in addition to the content of the data it gives you the option to add a header, to add a footer, and to adjust the margins around the printed page. Now I’m going to return to Page Layout View as well in a moment, but again it’s important to recognize that you can actually work, you can actually do pretty much all of your normal Excel operations in Page Layout View as well.


Learn Excel 2013 Now there is another option here called Custom Views and it is possible to create custom views, but they’re outside the scope of this course so I’m not going to mention those any further. Now those three main views are also represented in the bottom right hand corner of the screen because down here to the right hand edge of the Status Bar you have three buttons and those three buttons are the three buttons that let you switch between the three views. So you have Normal View, you have Page Layout View, and you have Page Break View. And you can easily in that way switch between the three of them. And to the right of them you have a Zoom Control. Now the Zoom Control is in the form of a slider which goes from zero to 100%. As you can see it currently says 60%. And you can move through that scale either by sliding with the slider or by using the minus and plus buttons at the ends. In addition, if you just click on that 60% you bring up a little Zoom dialog. And the Zoom dialog let’s you choose from main magnification levels, 200%, 100%, etc. down to Fit Selection which will basically fit whatever selection you have to the available space in the Window if that is physically possible or allows you to type in the percentage box. So, if you wanted a particular percentage like 87%, click OK and it will be set at 87%. Now note in the case of this particular display at the moment that 87%, we could actually make it quite a bit bigger than that. So if we said plus it takes us up in 10% increments and then we can make the maximum use of the space available or we can use the slider to slide it backwards and forwards. And again look for the setting that we want in a particular situation. Now if you’re using a touch device to do this, you can use the familiar pinch and stretch. So, first of all, let me do a stretch on the current display. And the stretch on the current display I can achieve exactly the same kinds of things and then pinch, stretch with two fingers, and that works in pretty much the way that you would expect it to. And still on the View tab, apart from the Workbook Views Group, there is a Zoom Group here. And in the Zoom Group, you have Zoom which brings up that same Zoom dialog. You have zoom to 100% which takes you straight to 100% magnification which is the default. And then you also have a zoom to selection button. Now with this you have to be a little bit careful because whatever you have selected will occupy the whole of the display. In fact, that’s not quite true because there’s a limit to how big Excel 2013 will show anything. So if you had a single cell, say, like that one selected, then it wouldn’t fill the whole display. But let’s suppose I © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 just take part of the display, say, I take these cells, the ones I’ve selected there, and click on zoom to selection. What happens is it fills in all of that selection. There may be extraneous material as well because, of course, the shape of the selection won’t necessarily agree with the shape of the display. It’s perhaps more precise to say that you will at least get the selection and you may get a few other things as well. It’ll make the selection as big as it can. So that’s zoom to selection. So now I’m just going to go back into Normal View again and back to 100%. And I’m now going to open a different workbook because there’s one other thing I want to demonstrate to you in View which is important, but in order to do it, I need a workbook with a bit more data in it. I should mention at this point that as far as Page Break View and Page Layout View, Page Layout View in particular, I’m going to look at that again in the next section because we’re going to do a bit of printing in the next section. What I’ve done here is to open a workbook which has got some stock market opening and closing figures. So it’s got an open figure, high figure, low figure, close figure, volume of trade, and the adjusted close figure. Now don’t worry if you’re not familiar with stock market figures because that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of what we’re going to do here. I’ve got this in Normal View and as you can see I’ve got seven columns of information. Watch what happens as I scroll down through the information. Now I can still see all of the figures but I lose the headings. Now there is a way of overcoming this and first of all let me just scroll back up to the top again and then go to the View tab. On the View tab, one of the commands in the Window Group is Freeze Panes. And if I click on the drop down next to Freeze Panes, I have three options. I can either select a number of panes, and I’ll explain this a bit more in a moment, and keep the rows and columns involved in those panes fixed while the rest of the worksheet scrolls or I can freeze the top row or I can freeze the first column. Now let me freeze the top row. Click on “Freeze top row”. Now let me scroll again. Now as I scroll down, the figures the top row stays in view and with the top row in view, I can still what each of the seven columns of data is. Now that’s called Freezing Panes and we will very often freeze the top row like that. Now the other thing that we will very often do is to freeze the first column. So with the same worksheet in view, click on the drop down next to Freeze Panes and this time say “Freeze first © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 column”. Now watch what happens as I scroll across. You notice I can’t scroll very far because, of course, there isn’t too much data on this sheet. But you’ll see it scrolls part of the way and the first column now, the Date column, stays fixed. Now the other option on the Freeze Pane list was Freeze Panes and this allows you to freeze a combination of top rows and left most columns. Let’s suppose you wanted to freeze the top two rows and the first column. Then what you would do is to discount the first two rows. So you’re going to put the cursor in Row 3 and if you want to freeze the first column, you’ll put it in Column 2. So if I put the cursor there so I’ve got the top two rows above it and the left first column to the left of it, put the cursor there, go to Freeze Panes, and then I would say Unfreeze Panes to clear what’s there already, tick again to Freeze Panes, and now you’ll see a horizontal line below Row 2 and a vertical line to the right of Column 1. That’s really the intersection where my selected cell is the intersection and now the top two rows and the left most one column are frozen. And watch what happens now as I scroll the data. If I go upwards and downwards I’ve got two rows frozen and bear in mind I can’t very far left and right, but if I do the first column is frozen. So you can freeze a combination of rows and columns using that approach. Whenever you’ve finished with the freezing as you’ve seen you go to Freeze Pane, Unfreeze Panes, and everything is cleared. So that’s it for the moment on Views. In the next section, we’re going to continue with a quick look again at Page Layout View but leading into printing the contents of a worksheet. So please join me for that.


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Video: Printing; Headers, Footers and Margins Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at printing and the first thing I want to do is to do a very straightforward print of this particular worksheet just to show you some of the basic ideas and then we’ll add a level of sophistication later on in this section. Now if all I want to do is to quickly print out the contents of this particular sheet, if I click on the File tab to go into Backstage View, one of the options in Backstage View is Print. And with that, there are a number of settings. If when you go into Print, you’re absolutely confident that what you’re going to print is exactly what you want, it’s going to look absolutely fine, maybe it’s something you’ve done many times before, you can just click that Print button and you’ll get a single copy of what you’re going to print. If you need more than one copy there’s a Copies button to the right of it and you can say how many copies you actually want. The rest of this is largely optional, but perhaps the second one not so much. Choosing the printer; you will have a default printer set. My default printer is currently set to OneNote because the work I’ve been doing recently I’ve been putting into notes in OneNote. I’m going to print this to a real actual printer. So I would’ve needed to change my printer to my printer which is that one. It connects to the ptinter, the printer is ready. If I need to go into Select Printer Properties, there’s a little link there to go into the Printer Properties. Now because everybody’s printers tend to be different, I’m not going to dwell on those now because if I show you mine they’ll probably look nothing like yours. So I’m going to skip over that and just look at the main settings, some of which here corresponds to some of the things that are in Printer Properties in general. Now, first of all, Settings, what do I want to print? By default this says Print Active Sheets, this single worksheet. And if the worksheet has got a lot of data on it, there may be a whole load of pages. So there may be anything from one to potentially even hundreds of pages. Now, if I want to specify a range of pages, so for instance if I said I want to print from Page 1 to 2. Now you might say, well, what makes me think there are two pages. Well, if you look on the right down at the bottom there it tells me there are two pages and that page is 1 of 2. And then I can say here Print Active Sheets. Well, that’s what I want in this case, but if you click on the drop down © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 I have also got the option to print the entire workbook; so that’s every sheet in the workbook or a selection. Now one of the features we’re also going to look at a little bit later on in this section is what’s called the Print Area. And if you’ve set a Print Area but you don’t want to use it, you’ve also got the option here of saying Ignore Print Area. But we’ll come back to that in a little while. I’m going to stick with Print Active Sheets. Now do I want the print out collated? Do I want to have all the page 1’s, then all the page 2’s or do I want page 1, page 2 for one copy, page 1, page 2 for another copy, and so on? In this case, it doesn’t matter because I’ve only said one copy it won’t make any difference. But if I wanted 10 copies it may help me if the printer collated them for me. Next we look at Portrait Orientation or, of course, Landscape Orientation. Now this is quite important in this particular example. If you look at what’s in the display on the right with Portrait Orientation. Now watch if I switch to Landscape Orientation. In Landscape Orientation what I want to print will actually print on a single sheet. So maybe that’s a better choice here. Next, the Paper Size. In the U.K. and Europe, we tend to default to A4. In North America, it tends to default to Letter Size. There’s actually a setting now, one rather useful option on the Excel Options. I won’t show you it now but if you look, you’ll find it fairly easily I’m sure. Where you can actually make these pretty much interchangeable. So if you go to print on one side and it’s actually the other type of paper is the one that is the default on the printer you’re using, it will actually interchange them because a lot of people do international printing now between the North American settings and he European settings. But I’m going to stick with A4 here. I then get choice of margins. I can go for normal margins, wide margins, narrow margins. I’m going to come back to margins in a little while. And then I can also look to scale what’s in there either with no scale, to deliberately fit the sheet on one page, to fit all the columns on one page. So even if it’s really quite a big spreadsheet, it will scale it so that all the columns are one page and if I’ve got multiple pages it will cover the additional rows. Or vice versa I can have something that will fit all the rows on one page and if I need more than one page it will be to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 accommodate the other columns. Now this is a pretty simple one in this case so all I’m going to do is say Fit Sheet on one page which it’s going to do anyway. Now when I’ve made all of my selections all I need to do then is to click the Print button. There’ll normally be a progress report there. That one flashed up and down pretty quickly there. And that’s basically how to do a print in Excel 2013. So let’s now look at some of the features of Page Layout and Page Layout View that can enable us to make a more sophisticated print or all or part of a workbook. If you click on the Page Layout tab, many of the options that can help you here are available on the Page Layout tab. And in fact, if you go into Page Layout View, we’ll use one of those buttons down at the bottom there. If you use these two together it gives you pretty much the maximum flexibility for preparing a print. Now what I’m going to do in this case is I’m going to reduce the zoom, so I’m going to get it a little bit more on there. Obviously, it’ll be more difficult for you to see the detail. But by doing that and bear in mind that the orientation here is still set at Landscape, you can see how Excel 2013 thinks this particular worksheet will be printed. Now in fact it knows there’s only one page so don’t worry about the others. The fact that they’re grayed out means they won’t actually exist if I print this. But this gives you a very good idea of how this particular sheet will print. And now we’re going to use some of the controls to improve how that looks. So having established that we’re only looking at the first sheet at the moment, let’s just zoom back a little bit, that’s probably enough. Now the first thing I’m going to do is to put a header on this. And if you do what it says there, click to add header, you can either type a header in there if you want something, or you can choose from a number of available standard headers. Now as soon as you go into that header, you get a new tab. I mentioned right at the beginning of the course that depending on what you were doing sometimes you’ll get additional tabs. And in this case under Header and Footer Tools, you get an additional tab which is the Design tab within the Header and Footer Tools. And on this tab, you’ve got a number of options. I’m not going to go into all of them now because I’m really just showing you the basics of this. One of the options is to say I want to put something in the header and if you look at the screen tip there, Add text to the header such as the page number, the name of the sheet, or the date. Now let’s click on the drop down and it gives us a number of standard types of header content. So for instance, I could © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 put the full file name in there or I could put something in like TobyA, Confidential, Page 1or some other one of these standard types of content. And some of those are set out here; page number, number of pages, current date, current time, file path, file name. Now let’s suppose that all I want to put in there at the moment is the sheet name. Now what it puts in is a special marker of what’s called a field and the field ampersand with the word Tab after it, that’ll be the name of the tab. So it’ll actually say TobyA. Now I’m going to press the spacebar and I’m also going to put in the current date; that’s another field.

So I’ve got ampersand, tab, space,

ampersand, date. Now when this prints it will put the name of the tab, TobyA, and the date. Now let’s go down and look at adding a footer. Well to add a footer, it’s pretty much the same sort of thing. Click on “Click to add footer” and in the footer I’m going to go back. I’m going to select that Design tab again and in the footer I’m going to put the page number. So that’s another field, ampersand Page. I’m going to press Space, then I’m going to type the word “Of”, then I’m going to press Space again, and now I’m going to put the number of pages. So in this case, that will be 1 of 1 but obviously in a much bigger sheet or perhaps when I’m printing a whole workbook it might say 23 of 75 or something like that. So ampersand Page is the field that says Current Page. Ampersand Pages is the total number of pages that are going to be printed. So that’s a footer. So having entered the footer there, I can just get out of that say press the Tab key; it takes me to another part of the footer. I can actually have a right hand side of the footer and indeed a left hand side of the footer and put more information in here. But this will do for the moment. As you can see, it now says 1 of 1. If you want to just flip back to the header, the header says TobyA and then today’s date. And then the last thing I want to look at in terms of these Design features, I’m going to go back to the Page Layout tab and here I’m going to look at the Margins. Now the margins on the page can be set for a number of reasons. One of them is that you have a lot to squeeze into a page; you may want to use narrow margins. It may be that you haven’t got very much and you want to use wide margins to help to center things. That’ll obviously depend on the specific situation you’re in. But when you’re working within a page, you can click on the Margins drop down here. To adjust the margins, click on that. You have a number of options: Normal, Wide, if you © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 want to use more of the space on the page for the margins narrow, and then you also have the Custom Margins option. The Custom Margins option you can set specifically the margins top, left, right, bottom, and then margins for header and footer as well. So I’m going to leave the margins as they are. But what I am going to do is to just remind you of one other thing and that is that as I said in the previous section, in Page Layout View you can edit and work pretty much as normal with Excel 2013. So for instance if I looked at this and I said, well, that looks a little bit messy. It’s only going to come two-thirds of the way across the page. I could actually adjust the column widths right where I am. Column A here is selected. So if I went to the right hand edge, I’ve got the usual controls. I could make that a little bit wider, go to Column B maybe make that one a little bit wider, and so on. So I can go in and adjust and adapt things and if I want something to look neat and well-balanced in a printer, I can do it there manually in Page Layout View. And, of course, having made all those adjustments if I then go into Backstage View, go to Print, I’ll now see a preview of my print which includes my header, my footer, and where I’ve adjusted the widths of the columns. It’s a much neater looking printout now. I’m sure you will have seen from this section and in particularly looking at Page Layout View that there are many other options available there. And there’s plenty of opportunity there for you to experiment with these to achieve really good looking printouts. So that’s it on printing. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 15 – Formulas and Functions Video: Overview of Formulas and Functions Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. If you ask experienced Microsoft Excel users what they consider to be the great strengths of Microsoft Excel, they’ll say that its greatest feature is its ability to do really impressive graphs and charts. But sometimes people forget that the other feature that underlies all of that is Excel’s ability to store lots of data and to do really complex calculations based on that data; in other words to put together the data on which the graphs and charts are drawn. Another very strong feature that people talk about is Excel’s ability to do analysis on sets of data and we’ll be coming back to that later in the course as well. But again the basis of that is Excel’s ability to do very sophisticated and complex calculations reliably and quickly on very large sets of data. Now in this section what we’re going to start to look at is how to setup Excel to do these complex calculations. And I’m going to start by using a very straightforward example to illustrate what’s going on. I’m back at our expenses sheet here and so far all of this data has been typed in. We’ve got dates, client names, descriptions, costs, recharge, etc. What if I wanted a total of all of these costs? Well, of course, I could add them up in my head or I could get my calculator out. But there’s a very quick way of summing some data in Excel and it’s this. If I select the first cell, drag down, and include the cell below that one and then if I go up here on the Home tab in the Editing Group and go to this button which has got the sigma sign there and I just click on that sign, look what happens. What Excel does is to total those figures for me. That’s the total cost, $196.95. So how does it do that? Well, when I perform an operation like the one that I just performed there what it does is it puts something that’s going to look a little unusual in that final cell. And the cell that says $196.95 if I click on that cell which is E9, look what it says in the formula bar. It doesn’t say $196.95 it says equal sign, sum, then it’s got a round bracket, E3, colon, E8. Now the E3, colon E8 bit is similar to something we saw much earlier on in the course. It specifies a range of cells. It’s cells from E3 to E8. That’s what’s called a range.


Learn Excel 2013 Sum is what’s called a function. Excel has many, many hundreds and hundreds of functions and sum is one of the simplest ones. And as the name implies, it’s the sum of what’s in the range. So it’s E3 to E8. And perhaps most importantly of all, right at the beginning it’s got an equal sign. The equal sign makes this a Formula. So the content of this cell is not just a number. It’s not just something we type in. There is a formula. There’s something to calculate. And when we do the calculation or more specifically when Excel does the calculation, it uses the function sum on the range E3 to E8. Now as you’ll see later on, we don’t always have just one range and one function.

This can become very complicated.

But in its simplest form that really

encapsulates the whole of what formulas and functions are about in Excel 2013. Now what I’m going to do is to undo what I just did. I’m going to leave the selection as it is and I’m going to go back up in the Editing Group on the Home tab, click the drop down next to sigma, and I’m going to look at one of the other available functions. And one of the other available functions is max. If I click in the cell, note the formula is different: equals MAX, capitals Max, E3 to E8. I’m sure you can see what that is. It says which is the maximum value in that range. So let me just undo that again and let’s look at some of these other available functions from here. If I click on that drop down again, I’m sure you can guess what Average will do and Count Numbers will count how many numbers there are in the range. And down here we have More Functions. Now as I mentioned before there are many, many functions in Excel and if you’re looking for a function to do a particular thing for you, you may well not know what it’s called. The way that Excel 2013 helps you out in this respect is that it gives you a search facility. Type a brief description of what you want to do and then click Go. I’ll show you how that works in a moment. But there’s also a category selection drop down here. If I click on this drop down it says do you want to look at the most recently functions, the ones you’ve used most frequently? Do you want all functions? That’s a very long list; Financial, Date and Time, Math and Trig, and so on; various categories. And if you particularly want say Statistical Functions at any time, if you click on Statistical Functions, there’s a list of the Statistical Functions. There are many just of those.


Learn Excel 2013 But let’s try this search feature. So suppose you want to do something to do with Statistics; say you want a Median Function. You know it’s to do with finding the median of some numbers. Click on Go and there you are. There is a Median Function. It tells you about it underneath the list and then gives you some other functions that involve a median in some way, things to do with quartiles and so on. If you know anything about statistics you probably have a reasonable idea of what all that means. So you can usually find the function that you want using this. So even with a context of dealing with a group of numbers like these you can use that facility to find the function you want to perform an operation. We’ve already done the sum. We’ve done the MAX and we now know how we would find a function to do the median. But now let’s take a look at the formula side of things. Let’s move away from functions. We’re going to come back to those later on and let’s look at the formula side of things. Let me choose a cell at random. That cell there. And let me type in the formula bar a formula. And the Formula I’m going to type is this: equals, E3 plus E8. Now that’s a very simple formula and as I type it, note it highlights the cell that appear in that formula. E3 is here. It’s got a sort of blue selection rectangle round it with corners; E3, 65.50. And E8 is also highlighted here. It got a red border around it; 36.25. Once I’ve typed that formula if I enter that formula what am I going to get. I’m going to $101.75 which is the sum of those two. And I did that without using a sum function. I just did it as a straight addition. Similarly if I wanted to change that formula, click in there again; note as soon as I click in the cells that were involved in the calculation are again highlighted. But I’m going to change now the plus to a minus. Enter again, $29.25. And I can, of course, extend the formula. So why don’t I say plus E6. Formula there, tick, that’s it. So the way the formula works is provided you’ve got the equal sign there then you can pretty much type any numbers in there that you like. So let’s try something else. I’m going to now select this cell and I’m going to once again type a formula in this cell and it’s going to be equals 2, the asterisk is the multiplication symbol, E3. So it equal 2 times E3. Now notice if I tick now the answer is $131.00. Now in this formula, Excel knows that E3 is a cell reference. It always recognizes cell references in that way by you giving the column number then the row number. Although in fact there’s more than one way of doing cell references as I will refer briefly to later on. But in this context it knows that E3 is the cell, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 whereas it knows that 2 is a constant. So, I could here write equals 2 times E3 and that particular column now in my table would tell me that that’s $131.00 is twice 65.50; if I had a reason to double it that would do the job. Now we come to another very important point and that is this. If I now select down and then go to the Fill button that we saw before, that’s this one, and do Fill down, watch what happens. I don’t get $131.00 in each of those cells. I get in each of those cells a figure that is double the equivalent cost figure. And if I click on the second one down, the one that’s 37.80, look at the formula. It’s not 2 times E3. It’s 2 times E4. What Excel does is if I Fill, or in fact if I do things like Copy and Paste, but if I Fill down, right, up, left with a formula it works out what the equivalent formula is depending on the type of Fill or Copy or Paste or whatever I’m doing I’m doing. So, it says here right, the top one was 2 times E3, we’re going down the row so the one underneath it must be 2 time E4, and the one underneath that must be 2 times E5, and so on. So it’s clever enough to extend the formula to basically generalize the formula to the other entries on our sheet. Now I’ve got a couple of other very important things to point out here. One of the important things to point out is supposing I try another formula here and here I put equals 2 times and this time I’m going to do D3. Now D3 is the description, Train fare New York to Atlantic City. What do you think is going to happen if I enter that formula? I’m going to get that thing; hash, value, exclamation mark. You are going to see hash, value, exclamation mark a lot when you use Excel because basically it means you’re doing some kind of invalid calculation. You cannot multiply Train fare New York to Atlantic City text by 2 or indeed by any other number. So you get that in the cell. And to the left of it you get this little warning sign here. If you click on that it gives you a screen tip. A value you used in the formula is of the wrong data type. So that normally tells you what’s wrong. But if you click on the little drop down there, you have an option of Help on this error; Show the calculation steps, Ignore the error. We’re going to look at some of those later on, but basically when you get that you’ve got something wrong with your formula. And the final thing to point out; if I say click on G6, $65.60 and the formula is equals 2 times E6. You may or may not have noticed this when we were looking at Copy and Paste earlier on, but © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 this means that a cell like G6 has two distinctly different properties. One property is the formula, bear in mind not every cell has a formula. Some cells have formulas. The cells in Column G have formulas whereas the ones in Column E don’t. But a cell can have a formula and it can have a value. And sometimes when you’re pasting a cell like this you have to be specific about whether you want to paste the formula. Do you want the formula or do you want the value? Because sometimes you’ll want one and not the other. So in this section I’ve really introduced you to Formulas and Functions, shown you a couple of examples, and talked about some of the approaches and terminology. There’s a lot more to find out about Formulas and Functions and that’s what we’re going to continue with in the next section. So, please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Cell References Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In the previous section, we started looking at Formulas and Functions and I gave you a brief overview of the main features. In this section, we’re going to concentrate on how formulas work and we’re also going to look at cell references, ranges, and names. Now first of all, I want to look at cell references. You may recall from the previous section that we can put together a little formula to do calculations. For example, on this particular sheet that I’m using, I’m doing some estimation on the refurbishments of a house. And the first thing I’ve got is a list of the dimensions of the rooms in the house. So for each of the rooms, I’ve got the length in feet, the width in feet, and the height in feet. Now it’s a pretty straightforward job to multiply the length by the width to get the floor area. And the formula there if I click in that Cell D4, the formula would be equals and then it would be B4, asterisk, asterisk is the multiplication symbol, C4. If I tick, I get an area of that room in square feet. Now as I also pointed out if I selected down, now you should know where to find the Fill down Command on the Home tab in the Cells Group. But in fact there’s a keyboard shortcut which is Control-D to fill down. And what actually happens as we saw in the previous section is that in each of these other cells, we get a different version of the formula. So if you look at the formula bar as I click through the cells you can see how they change. Now there is another very important way of being able to reference cells. And another important way is to use what are called absolute references. Now if I use an absolute reference, the reference does not change if I Fill or Copy and Paste a particular formula. Let me show you how this works. Let’s suppose that mistakenly in this formula instead of putting B4 times C4, what I put was this: dollar-B, dollar-4 times C4. Now the dollar what it effectively is it makes this an absolute reference. It says that this formula is definitely B4. If I Fill or Copy and Paste, it will still be B4. Let me tick that. Obviously I get the same answer on the first one. Watch what happens now when I fill down. So select those other Fields, press Control-D. Now in fact the answers are all wrong now except for the first one. But if I look on the second one, the living room one, look at what the formula is; it’s dollar-B, dollar-4 times C5. The B4 part if I make it


Learn Excel 2013 an absolute reference does not change. Now clearly in this case that’s wrong and that’s not what I want at all. But that’s to demonstrate the affect of using what are called absolute references. Now we’re going to come back to using absolute references a little bit later on in this section. But I want to show you something now which is slightly off the track of what we’re doing, but quite important. And that is to talk about an old way of referencing cells in workbooks. This was the early method that was used, very early versions of Excel, but sometimes this does still surface and you will still see it mentioned sometimes, partly because certain things you do in Excel need this other way of referencing cells. Now we’re not going to need it but I just want to point it out to you because you may come across it. Now in order to demonstrate this to you, I’m going to leave everything else on this sheet the same but I’m going to go into Backstage View to look at the Options and then I’m going to click on Formulas. Now one of the options within Formulas under Working with Formulas, if I just show you the screen tip there, is R1C1 Reference Style. Change the way Excel Formulas refer to cells. Instead of using letters for columns and numbers for rows, this option enables using numbers for both rows and columns. Cells are then referenced in the format R1C1. Let me just check that and click on OK. Look at that formula there. Now maybe this formula is wrong but it doesn’t really matter. What this now says is R4, C2, Row 4, Column 2. This is how these used to be referenced. Row 4, Column 2. And then the next one is row, column and then in brackets minus 1. Now this is where it gets a little bit confusing. The cell I’m trying to reference is that one. It’s actually in the third column and the fifth row. But the way that the old system referenced it was to say it’s in the same row as me, remember we’re looking at the formula here for the living room area. Same row but the column is one less. So when you’re looking at a formula in this cell, the one I’m hovering over here, the living room floor area cell, and the formula says RC-1, it means same row, one less column. So same row one less column is the width. If you reference something somewhere else, it gives the row number and the column number.

Now actually some

spreadsheet-type products still use that approach and it was the traditional approach. And in some ways I find it preferable to the approach of using letter numbers for columns and numbers for rows. But letter numbers for columns and numbers for rows is the most popular way now. That’s normally how we work. You may well come across that, but we certainly aren’t likely to need it during the rest of this course.


Learn Excel 2013 So I’ve changed the referencing system from the R1C1 system as it’s called back to the conventional one now and everything’s the same as it was on this spreadsheet. I’m also going to now correct this formula here. So instead of saying dollar-B, dollar-4, the absolute references, I’m going to use B4 times C4, tick, fill down, Control-D, and I now have all my floor areas correct again. Now the next thing I want to do is to fill in the wall areas for the rooms. Now so far we’ve dealt with a couple of very simple calculations, just a couple of multiplications really and a bit of addition and subtraction in the previous section. But as things get more complex, we’re going to come across the problem you will have come across at school which is that sometimes you have to make it clear exactly what order a calculation has to be performed in. And with the case of the area of the floor, the calculation we did just now, area floor is length times width, that’s simple. If I click on A16, it actually emphasizes that we’ve got a more complex calculation here because to find the area of the walls of a room you basically say if I look at one of the long walls it’s area is length times height. I’m assuming here that these rooms are rectangular. So I’ll have two long walls, length time height twice, and then I’ll have two short walls, width times height twice. So I’ve got to work out the length times the height, double that, and the width times the height, double that, and add those two figures together. Now as with the similar calculations that you will have done at school I’m sure, the key here is to understand operator precedents. So that’s the sequence in which Excel does its calculations. And fortunately for us the operator precedents follow exactly the standard that you would expect. And in any case you can use brackets, braces, exactly as you will have used at school as well I’m sure, to make sure that the calculation is done in the correct order. So what I’m going to do here is to work out what that formula is for the wall area, first of all, of the dining room. Now one important thing here is to just bear in mind that using the formula bar is a great way of entering in this case because you can start to type in what you think you need and then you can work on that until you’re pretty sure it’s right. So I know it’s a formula so I’m going to put an equal sign in to start. Let’s suppose that I just wanted the area of a long wall. Now the length of the room is 15, the width is 21, the height is 9. So if I go for the length of the room as 15, the area would be 15, asterisk, 9. Now the 15/9, the length is actually B4. So I really want B4 there, and the 9, the height, is E4. And if I wanted to play really safe now I could say, well, I want two © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 of those, so I want 2 times, and then you might be inclined to put those in brackets like that. Now in fact in this case, as I’m sure if you’ve got any kind of ability with arithmetic at all, you realize those brackets are unnecessary. But sometimes putting the brackets in helps you think even if you take them out again later. So for the length of the room, the equivalent wall area is B4 times E4 and I want two of those. Now I need to add to that so that’s the plus symbol, 2, I know it’s going to follow the same pattern. And this is going to be width which is C4 times and again the heights the same so that’ll be E4 as well. So I reckon that formula is correct. So I’ll want two of B4/E4 plus two of C4/E4. Let’s see what that gives me if I enter that. So what it’s given me here is an error message and it said we found a typo in your formula and tried to correct it too. Now look at what it’s suggested as the correcting. You look at the formula bar and you’ll see the mistake that I made. I left out the asterisk after the 2. In school, you probably will have written this formula. You wouldn’t have needed to put an asterisk with the brackets there. In Excel you do. None of the operators really are assumed. The operators asterisk is the one you use for multiplication, plus for addition, minus for subtraction. The slash symbol is the division and then for exponentiation, raising to a power, we use the up arrow character. But we’ll look at more of that a little bit later on. So if I miss out an operator, Excel will flag that as an error. It will very often make a suggestion about correcting it. And I look at that and I say, ah yeah, I see what I’ve done wrong. I forgot the asterisk after the 2. Do you want to accept this correction? Yes I will. Now, of course, sometimes it will suggest a correction which isn’t a correction at all and I’d say No and correct it to what it should be. But on this occasion it’s got it absolutely right for me. So click on Yes and I’ve got a wall area for that room of 648 square feet. Now it would take a very long time for me to go through all of the operators and other aspects of formulas in Excel. We are going to continue with formulas in the next section and we’re going to use some functions as well. But for a much more detailed account of formulas, including things like what all the operators are and information about precedents and so on, this is one of those areas where if you do a search on the Excel Help and search on the term operators, you’ll get this very useful overview section and within the overview section, if I scroll right down there with an explanation of this, you’ll get a list of all of the Arithmetic Operators and then things like © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Comparison Operators. We’ll be looking at those later on. Text Operators, Reference Operators a lot more information about Operators than I can cover in detail in this course. So that’s a good source for further information. So let’s go back to our spreadsheet here. I’m going to do a Fill down and then Control-D and, of course, if I look at say the family room, the last room in the list, look at the formula. It’s 2 times B12 times E12 plus 2 times C12 times E12 to give the total wall area of that room. And, of course, by now if I said to you give me the total wall area for the house, we can go down there, go beyond the bottom one there, use the sigma up on the Ribbon to give us a total; 5,268 square feet. And we could even put something in here, maybe do a merge using this button here, Merge and Center. And put in there total and there we are. We’ve got a total wall area for the house of 5,268 square feet. Okay. So in this section we’ve looked at Formulas. We’ve looked at a more complicated formula, some information about cell references and so on. Now we’re going to turn our attention to the floors of this house and we’re going to try to work out what it’s going to cost to carpet this house. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Names Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. This is the third section on Formulas and Functions and in this one we’re going to introduce Names. But, first of all, let’s go back to our refurbishment estimation job and it should be pretty straightforward for you now to work out the floor area of each of these rooms. So, by way of revision, let’s put in the floor area for the dining room. So that should be pretty straightforward for you. Select the cell, go into the formula bar and type equals and it’s B4, asterisk, C4. Click on the Enter tick and I’ve got that area. Now we also know that to fill that formula down into the other cells, pretty straightforward. Select the cells, Control-D. And by now also you know how to then put a total into the total floor area at the bottom here, the Cell D13. But this time I want to do this in a rather different way. So first of all, I’m going to click into the cell where I want to put the total and I’m going to type the equal sign because I know I’m going to use a formula. And you’ve already seen by now, you’ll know that the function I need is the Sum function to add these up. But supposing I couldn’t quite remember what it was called and I thought, well, I think it begins with an S. You can type a letter. So let’s say you typed the letter S and what Excel 2013 does is to present you with a list of the functions that begin with the letter S. Now it’s actually quite a long list as you can see. It’s got all sorts of things. There are Standard Deviation Functions there. You know about those if you know a little bit about Statistics. There are other functions like SIN, the sign, SINH, the hyperbolic sign if you know your math. But if I go down here, I can see what, there’s the Sum function; that’s the one I want. Well I’ve typed the S. What about typing the U? That narrows it down to the SU’s. And then I say well its one of those Sum, ah it’s that one. It’s Sum. So as soon as you see the one that you want double click on that and not only does it put the name of the function in for you and the first bracket, but it also describes to you what the arguments are. That is what do I put in the brackets? Now in the case of Sum, you can just put in a sequence or a range of cells and it will sum them up. But for some, functions the arguments are a little bit more complicated. We’ll look at that a little bit later on. So, you will also probably know from the earlier sections that you could type in now the range of cells we want, which is basically D4 to D12. So that would be D4, colon, D12. But there’s © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 another way of doing that as well and that is to say, well, I don’t particularly want to work out what the cells are. Why don’t I click in the first one? Now watch what happens when I click in the first cell. It actually puts D4 in the formula for me and gives me a variant on the marching ants around the cell I’ve chosen. And now you might say, ah that’s great. I just need to go down to D12. But you can do something even easier than that because if you grab the corner of the marching ants box and drag it down, look what happens in the formula. It actually puts the D12 in for you and when you release all, you’ve got to do really is to type the closing bracket and your formula is there for you all done without you doing much typing and also without having to remember too much either or to work out exactly what that range of cells is. So tick it, there’s our total floor area. So the next calculation that we’re going to do is to calculate for each of the rooms in the house its percentage of the total floor area of the house. I don’t know whether you can remember how to calculate percentages. Most people can, some people it’s a bit of a blank. It tends to be the sort of thing that if you don’t do it very often you maybe forget how to do it. So I’ll tell you how to calculate a percentage. If you wanted to find for the dining room its percentage of the total floor area of the house you do this calculation. You take its floor area divide it by the total and multiply by 100. So that’s the calculation I’m going to do. So if I click in there first, put an equal sign because I know it’s going to be a formula. The dining room is D4, its floor area, divided by, and then I want to divide by the total which is D13. Now I should point out here that I am making a deliberate mistake. But D13 appears to be right. If you’ve spotted what the mistake is already that’s absolutely fine. If not, you’ll find out in a moment. And that’s going to tell me what proportion of the total this floor area is. So let me just click on the tick mark just to see what I get for that. And it gives me a figure of 0.175. Now that is as a proportion. If I want that expressed as a percentage, all I’ve got to do is to go up to Format Cells. I could, of course, right click as well, but I’ll go to Format Cells where the current category for that cell is number. If I make it into a Percentage. Decimal places. Mmm. I don’t really want decimal places on this percentage. I’m just going to put it down to zero decimal places. Click on OK and see what I get. It actually is 17%. So the dining room has 17% of the total floor area. Now, let’s fill that down and see what happens. Select, Control-D, what do I get? I get a load of errors. Now if you’ve worked out why I’ve got a load of errors, that’s good; if not you’ll find © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 out in a moment. As we saw before when you get an error say like this one, if you click on it there’s a little message at the left, hover over. The formula or function used is dividing by zero or empty cells. So let’s look at that formula. It equals D5. That’s fine. Divided by D14. Ah, hang on a minute. D14’s got nothing in it. And by now hopefully you’ve seen the error. That shouldn’t have been D4 divided by D13. It should have been D4 divided by dollar-D, dollar-13. I should’ve used an absolute reference because as I go down these percentages for each of the rooms in the house the total stays fixed. It’s always the same Cell, D13, to divide by. It’s only the top, the numerator, in the fraction that changes and goes D4, D5, D6, D7, and so on. So let me correct that. I still, of course, have 17%. Let me fill down again. Ah, that’s better. So the dining room is 17%, living room 22%, kitchen 18%, and so on. Now I want to point out something about this formula here; this one for the first percentage. Dollar-D, dollar-13 is an absolute reference. And you notice I put dollar twice. I put dollar-D and dollar-13. Now it’s possible to fix just the D part, just the column letter or just the row number. So I could have a reference like dollar-D13 or D dollar-13. The dollar affects either the column letter or the row number. If you have both, it’s a fully absolute reference. If you just have one dollar, so maybe dollar for the D or dollar for the 13, then that’s what’s called a mixed reference because it’s partly the sort of general relative reference and partly the absolute reference. Now we’re not going to do an example of that on this course, but just bear in mind you don’t always have both dollars. You may just have one of them. You may want to fix either the column letter or the row number but not the other. So now we’re going to look at a very important aspect of Excel 2013 and that’s the use of what are called Names. Now if you have a particular cell like this one, the total floor area, and it’s an important figure in relation to the work you’re doing in your worksheet. You can give it a name. You don’t have to remember that it’s D13 or if you like dollar-D, dollar-13. You can give it a name. With the cell selected, if you look up to the left of the formula bar, you have what’s called the Name Box and you can see that it says in the Name Box D13 at the moment. But I could if I select that I could give it a name. I could call it Total Floor. And that is now the name of that. I can still refer to it as D13, but I can also refer to it by its name.


Learn Excel 2013 And it’s very easy in fact to use names in formulas. Let’s suppose I go to the first formula here, the one that’s doing the percentage of total area for the dining room. Its D4 divided by dollar-D, dollar-13. Let me delete the dollar-D, dollar-13 part and let me start typing and watch what happens. T-O, now what Excel 2013 offers me is the only function that begins T-O, that’s today. You notice it’s a function because you might just be able to make out the little FX in a circle there, but it also offers me any names that I’ve got defined which begin T-O. And I, of course, I’ve got a name. It’s Total Floor. If I select that I now get Total Floor in the formula. Tick it. Of course, I’ve still got 17%, fill it down. It’s used in exactly the same way. Now using Names within an Excel 2013 is very helpful. If you go to the Formulas tab, there is a Defined Names Group and if you go to Name Manager, it opens up the Name Manager dialog which lists all of the names that you have associated with this particular workbook. At the moment, of course, we only have one, it’s called Total Floor. Current value is 1803. It gives us a reference. That reference is quite important because it tells us that it’s in Cell D13, but it also tells us which worksheet it’s on.

It says equals Floors, that’s the name of the sheet, the

exclamation mark says the name of the worksheet is floors. What’s after the exclamation mark is the cell reference on that sheet which is D13, of course. We can define the scope. We can actually in this case see that the scope of this name is throughout the workbook. So I can use it anywhere on the workbook. When you’re looking at the Name Manager, if you go on to Edit, it lets you edit details about that name. You could change the name. You could change its scope. You can put a comment on to describe something more about the name. I’m not going to go into that now. I just want you to get the general principle of using names because now we’re going to take another cell and give that a name as well. And the cell we’re going to give it to is this one, L3 over here. Now L3 is going to be the cell that holds the budget carpet cost per square foot for carpet in this house. And it’s going to be $2.20 per square foot. So I’ve typed 2.20. I’m going to tick it. I’m going to make it into a Currency. So I’m going to go back to the Home tab and use Format Cells from there. Choose it as Currency, click on OK. Also on the Home tab, I’m going just tidy up the alignment a little. So my budget carpet cost per square foot is 2.20. And that cell is L3. So I’m then going to go into the Name Box. I’ll call it Carpet Cost. Press Enter and I’ve now got a second name. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So it should be pretty straightforward for me to work out the total budget cost for this carpet because if I click in F4 say. I won’t do all the formatting now. What will be the formula to go in F4? It would be equals. I want the floor area of the dining room which is D4 times the carpet cost. There it is at the top of the list there, double click, tick, fill it down, change the format of each of those to Currency, click on OK, and there are all my individual costs for carpet for the rooms of the house. And, of course, I can work out a total as well. Right, here’s one for you now. I have Example 05 which is a mileage expenses reclaim form. In the header of the form, there is a rate per mile box currently set at 31 cents. It covers a period November 12 and in the body of it I’ve got a list of a number of trips. Each one I’ve got an Odometer Start, milometer start mileage, Odometer End, milometer end mileage. I want you to put in here the mileage involved in each of these business related trips, the cost based on that rate per mile, and then totals both at the bottom of each column and in these two boxes in the header. And remember, first of all, I want you to use at least one name on this sheet and secondly I want you to make sure that if I change the rate per mile the totals both in terms of mileage and the amount claimed are still going to be correct. So that’s Example 05. My version of the answer is in Example 06. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Finding Errors; New Excel Functions Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to finish looking at Formulas and Functions in general and I’m going to cover some of the general tools both to help you working with formulas and to locate the functions you might need in your workbooks. So, we’ll start by taking a quick look at Excel Options. The key page here within Excel Options is the Formulas Page. And if you look at the very top there, Change options related to formula calculation performance and error handling. Now at the very top we have a section, Workbook calculation options. I can’t remember the last time I switched this off. But generally speaking what this means is that as you work on your workbook all the calculations are done for you. If you change a cell and other cells depend on it, totals change, multiplications, other formula and function evaluations change.

It all happens

automatically, instantly and in the background. And that is really the way that the vast majority of people work all the time in Excel. The only situation you may come across where it will be worth switching this off and perhaps setting it to manual is if you’re dealing with a very large and complex workbook and the calculations are so complex that they significantly slow you down while you’re working. So you’ve maybe got dozens of worksheets. You’ve got hundreds or thousands of calculations on each one using some very complex functions and every time you type, there’s a delay while it recalculates the contents of many cells and many worksheets. If that were the case and to be fair it doesn’t happen very often, it might be appropriate to switch automatic calculation and revert to manual calculation which means you could make all the changes you wanted to make and then click a button to say Calculate and wait for it all to happen. It’s quite unlikely. It could possibly happen, but it’s worth knowing that it is an option. So moving on to the next section, Working with Formulas. We’ve already seen this what we can use to use the R1C1 Reference Style instead. The next one, Formula AutoComplete is also very important. It’s actually set on here and that is the thing that means that as I type, so when I’m entering a formula, as you saw earlier if I start to type the name of a function it will come up with suggestions about what that function name will be. And, of course, when I’ve got names it will come up with names that match that as well. Now AutoComplete is a fairly consistent feature in Office 2013, as in earlier versions of Office, and if you’ve used any of the components


Learn Excel 2013 of Office before you’ll understand AutoComplete. You can switch it off quite easily here and then as you type you won’t get those messages. Some people fine those suggestions rather annoying and I must admit that a lot of the time that I’m using it, I find the AutoComplete facility can be a bit annoying as well and I do occasionally switch it off. In case, you haven’t quite worked out how that would look. If I switch it off now, click on OK, I’ll start a new workbook. Let me just a Control-N for a new empty workbook. Now let me say put a couple of cells, a couple of content in there. If I want to now put equals and then I’m going to say the sum of E2 and F2. I now put equals S, there’s no suggestion. U, there’s no suggestion. It’s not suggesting that that might be a sum function. So that’s really what I am eliminating if I switch off the AutoComplete feature. So within the Excel Options for Formulas they are the key settings. There are at the bottom of this page a selection of error checking rules and you can selectively decide whether you want these. I’m not going to go through them all because some of them take quite a bit of explanation. Each of them as you can see has a screen tip which will explain more what the particular error check does. And you may find, particularly in certain circumstances that you may want to switch off one or more of these error checking rules. But I’ll leave those for the moment and I’ll return to the question of evaluating formulas. Now a couple of sections ago, we put in a formula for the wall area of a room. I’m just going to click on this cell in this worksheet and you can see that formula now. Now there are some facilities within Excel 2013 that help us when we’re having problems with a formula. Now in this particular case, I don’t think that’s a particularly complex formula. But it’s a very good one for illustrating one or two of these facilities. So having selected the formula, if I now go to the Formulas tab, there is a section on the Formulas tab called Formula Auditing. And Formula Auditing gives us a way of looking at what formulas are doing, how they’re being evaluated and so on, to try to identify problems or perhaps even just to better understand what’s going on. One of the buttons on the right there, this lower one here, is called Evaluate a Formula. And if you look at the screen tip it says “Debug a complex formula.” Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to use this particular one here. This is the formula that says 2 times B4 times E4. B4 is the length of the room. E4 is the height. C4 is the width of the room, E4 the height. So © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 we’re going to work through that formula and we’re going to see how that Evaluate Formula function can help us. So if I click on Evaluate Formula, it brings up the formula itself: 2 times B4 times E4 plus 2 times C4 times E4. Now, one thing about this is that the next thing that it’s going to do is always underlined. So if I click the Evaluate button at the bottom of this dialog, just watch what happens. Look at the Formula area, that white area in there. It substitutes 15 for E4. Now if I just pull that over to the side so you can see the numbers. Now click Evaluate again. It puts the 9. Now it does what’s in the braces, so it does the 15 times 9, evaluate, that’s 135. What’s the next step going to be? It’s going to multiply 2 by 135. And so on. So you can step through a complex formula. It doesn’t really matter how complex it is. A step at a time and see exactly what Excel 2013 is doing. This is also particularly helpful if you’re not quite sure that you’ve got the brackets in the right place or you’re not quite sure how the operator precedents are working. So that’s Evaluate Formula which I think is pretty useful. Now another feature of Excel 2013 that can help, particularly when you’re dealing with very complex formulas, is the ability to trace precedents and dependents. Let me give you a particular example. Let’s suppose that I’m looking at this total here. I can see the formula sum F4, F12. But let’s suppose that I’ve got a much more complex formula than that. It’s referring to other cells and each of those in turn is referring to other cells using perhaps complex functions and so on. Whatever cell I’ve got selected in the Formula Auditing Group, if I look at Trace Precedents, I will see arrows to all of the cells that in some way contribute to its value. Now if I click Trace Precedents here, I can see blue arrow that covers basically all of the cells from the top one there, the wall area of the dining room and all of the others as well. And what it’s saying to me is that the value that goes into, note the arrow going into this field, is a function of all of those. If I were to choose one of those and say where does it get its value from? Click the same thing, Trace Precedents. I would see that it gets its value from three other Cells; that one, that one, and that one. And they’re, of course, to the three Cells that are involved in this formula. Now to remove the arrows at any time just click on Remove arrows. I can also use it to do the opposite. I could say, for instance, here’s the width of the kitchen. What’s that used in? And to do that, I do Trace Dependents; find the other fields that depend on the value in the width in the kitchen; so Trace Dependents.

That says that feeds through to that number.


Okay what are the

Learn Excel 2013 dependents of that number? Dependent of that number is that number. So I can basically trace forwards or backwards how one element of a worksheet affects other elements of a worksheet. And just one other useful thing there as well. In the Formula Auditing Group on the Formulas Tab, if you look at that top button it is Show Formulas. And this is a good option when that it will actually show you all of the formulas that are used on a sheet. Obviously, this can get pretty complicated. But it’s very useful for finding where you have formulas and when you can see all of the formulas in view as here it’s sometimes easier to just make sure that what each of them doing appears to be correct. To stop showing the formulas, you just click the button again. Now one other thing I’d like to point out to you about the Formulas tab is that there is a Group on the right, the Calculation Group, which is involved in the thing I talked about earlier on about switching between Automatic and Manual Calculation. Now the chances are that you won’t need manual calculation but if you do you don’t actually have to go into Excel Options to switch between. You can switch here. There are three options. We’re mainly concerned here with Automatic and Manual. There is one in the middle, Automatic accept for Data Tables, but until you find out about Data Tables that won’t mean very much to you. So just think of it as Automatic and Manual. If you switch to manual which means the calculations are not done as you type and as you work on your worksheets. These two buttons on the right are the ones that actually do the manual calculation. The top one, Calculate Now, which has a keyboard shortcut of F9, calculates the entire workbook. The lower one which has a keyboard shortcut of Shift plus F9 calculates the active sheet. Now with both of these, you’re only going to need them if you have Automatic Calculation turned off and the chances are that you won’t have it turned off. But if you need to, you need to know about those. I’m going to switch it back on to Automatic. Now finally in this section I’m going to take a quick look at the functions that are available in Excel 2013. First of all, you should remember earlier on that we looked at the Insert Function dialog and that will work perfectly well when you’re working on a formula to help you to find the right function. You should recall we have a search facility. We can select by Category. And when we’re selecting if we click on a particular function, we get a description of what the function does at the bottom. So that’s usually a way that you’ll find the function that you want. But there are some other options and one of the options is if you’re working with functions in a © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 particular category the functions are categorized here on the Formulas tab in the Function Library Group, the main groups are there. So one important group, of course, is Recently Used, which are the most recently used functions. You’ll probably see that these ones at the top are the ones that we’ve been using quite a bit so far in the course. And then we also have things like Financial Functions. We have Logical Functions, If, Not, True, and so on. We have Date and Time Functions. Things like looking at what the time is now, that sort of thing. And then we have Math and Trig Functions. The sort of things you’d normally expect: Signs, Co-signs, Factorials, and so on. Now all in all Excel 2013 has about 400 or so functions. So there are a lot of them and finding the one you want is usually a bit of a challenge if it’s not one you use all the time. Apart from the categories that are in view here, we also have More Functions and the More Functions list includes categories such as Statistical, Engineering, Cube, Information, Compatibility, and Web. Now one very useful source of information about the functions is to use Microsoft.com itself. And if you look at the What’s New in Excel 2013 Page that we looked at earlier on, one of the features highlighted there is New Excel Functions. And as it says here, you’ll find several new functions in the Math and Trigonometry, Statistical, Engineering, Date and Time, Lookup and Reference, Logical, and Text Function Categories. That’s which is most of the categories actually. And if you follow the link there, Excel Functions by category it takes you to this very useful page on Microsoft.com which categorizes all of the functions. Obviously, it’s got the same ones that you see in Excel itself. But if you go down there, you get a good explanation of each one and then a link for each of the functions through to a lot more information about that function. And that also includes all of the new functions as well. So that’s it on Formulas and Functions for now. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 16 – Working with Workbooks Video: Multiple Workbooks and Windows; Comparing Workbooks Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at working with workbooks. Some of the features that are particularly important when you have more than one workbook open at a time, the sort of things you can do between workbooks and to compare workbooks, and the finally we’re going to look at the sort of information you may want to store with your workbook which is not actually part of the data in the workbook itself. So it’s more information about the workbook. So the first thing I’m going to do is to open two of the workbooks that we’ve been working with. So first of all, let’s get the refurb estimation workbook open again. I’ll go back to the room sizes page and then also from the list of recent workbooks, we’ll go for one of these sample files. Now the first thing to notice is that when you do this is Excel 2013, unlike earlier versions of Excel you actually finish up with two windows. Each of the workbooks occupies its own window in Excel 2013. Now I should point out that there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have two or three or however many workbooks open that you want in Excel 2013. You will, of course, be restricted by the memory in your computer, but that may not necessarily restrict you very much. I should also point out and this is particularly relevant if you’ve used Excel before, if you go the View Menu, one of the options on the View Menu, the equivalent now is Switch Windows. And this says quickly switch to another open Excel Window. Now if I click on the drop down, there it lists the two workbooks in this case that I have open. There may well be more than two will be listed here and one easy way of switching between them is just to select from the list that you see here. So ticked is the one that currently has the focus. That’s the mileage expenses form that you worked on earlier on. Let’s switch back to the refurb one. It’s as simple as that. And then conversely to back there again same approach. Now depending on which operating system you’re using you may also know how to switch between windows; for instance using the sort of flipping approach using the Alt and Tab keys on your keyboard. I’m not going to go into that now, but if you have a method like that then that’s perfectly useable as well. You’ll also see usually on the taskbar on a PC that if you hover over


Learn Excel 2013 the Excel icon, it will show you the two or more windows for the two or more workbooks that you have open at the time. So there are various ways of switching between those windows. And having each workbook within a window makes it a lot easier to work on one workbook without being unduly influenced by the other workbook or having the danger of upsetting the other workbook. Now apart from the ability to switch between the workbooks, there are various other things that we can do as well. On the View tab in the Window Group, you’ve already seen the Switch Windows button here, to the left of that there’s three little buttons on top of each other. If you look at the top one, it is a button to View Side by Side. And where you have more than one workbook open, you can actually view side by side. Now unfortunately because of the way this course has been recorded, I can’t actually demonstrate this to you. Basically if you enable the viewing side by side and then go to the bottom button, you can then reset the view of the say two workbooks side by side so that they have an equal share of the screen each. This can be particularly useful when you’re doing a direct comparison either between two workbooks that should be the same or, and this is a very important point, where you are using data from one workbook in another because when you’re doing Copy and Paste, when you’re doing formulae and so on, there is nothing to say that you have to restrict what you’re putting into the formulae to the contents of the current workbook. You can use contents from other workbooks as well. Now doing that is outside the scope of this course. I’m not going to go into that now, but that’s an important option for you to be aware of. Now the other thing to remember when you’ve got more than one workbook open is that some of the things we talked about earlier also become possible. So for instance if I were to look at this Floors tab, right click on it and then do Move or Copy, I can do a Move of the selected sheets to book. I’ve now got a choice because I’ve got two books open. I could actually move that to the other book or maybe make a copy to the other book. So the Floors tab will now appear in the other book. The original is still here, of course, because I’ve done a copy. But that’s a great way of moving sheets between books that you’re working on. And this can be particularly useful in situations like one where you’ve got a workbook that you’re pretty happy with so you’ve been using it on one project and some of the sheets in it you think great I’m going to be able to use it


Learn Excel 2013 on that other project. You may not want to copy the whole workbook but there may be one or two very useful sheets. So that’s a great way of doing that. So with two or more workbooks open, I can work on them independently. I can switch between them. I can transfer whole sheets of information between them and I can access each other’s sheets and cells and formulae in one can reference cells in another. So there’s a lot of flexibility. When you finish working with one of the workbooks, you just go into Backstage View as usual, click on Close, and I’m back at the mileage expenses workbook. Now that’s got a worksheet that it didn’t have before, the one I just copied, Floors. So is I right click, click on Delete. I get a warning that I can’t undo deleting sheets. So if I delete this it’s gone forever. And there we are. I can carry on working on the mileage expenses worksheet having closed the other one. Now there’s just one more thing that I’d like to quickly look at in this section and that’s to do with the metadata about a workbook. Now we’re going to look at this metadata in a different way in a little bit more detail right towards the end of the course. But for the moment, I want you to take a look at Backstage View and in the Info Page here, that’s the top page, you have some buttons on the left. We’re going to be looking at these later on, things like protecting a workbook and inspecting a workbook. But on the right you see some Properties. And the properties are basically the metadata. So you see the size of the workbook, its title. I can have tags. I can have categories. So I could add it to a category. And then I have dates like when it was last modified, when it was created, when it was last printed, and so on. I have an author’s name, last modified by, etc. Now that’s not the full set of properties. If you click at the bottom on Show All Properties, you get a list of all of the properties and some of the properties are maintained for you by the system. So for instance, last modified, Windows looks after that for you. Whereas if you wanted to change the status, for instance you wanted to change the status of this to draft, you could just put the status in there. If you want to add a category, you could put it in there and you can basically decide what sort of Categories you want. So with some of these you can edit them and some of them you can’t. And if you click on the Properties tab at the top, there are two other sets of options. Now one of the options is Show Document Panel. And if you’ve used Excel before, you’ll be familiar with this one because if you select Show Document Panel, what happens the panel with these properties appears at the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 top of the workbook. So perhaps if you can’t quite remember what it’s about or you want an easy way of filling some of those properties in you can use that approach. When you finish with the panel, click on Close and the panel disappears again. And finally let me just go back into Backstage View again, go to that Properties button there with the drop down again, Advanced Properties gives us access to more Document Properties. Now these are arranged in a dialog with five tabs. We have some general information at the front such as the location, the type, it’s a Microsoft Excel worksheet, the size, some of that date information. We then have some summary statistics including the title, the subject, the author, the manager, company, category, keywords, comments, etc. We have some Statistics. We have information about the contents. This includes things like the names of the worksheets and any named ranges. I’ve got one here, Rate per mile. You should have a similar one in yours. And then you can also define Custom Properties that you use for this as well. So, that’s the metadata about a workbook. Now if I go back to the Summary, there you can see I’ve got title, subject, author, etc. What I would like you to do is a little exercise now is to take your equivalent of Example 6 which is the mileage workbook where you worked out the amount of the mileage claim and I want you to basically add and change that summary information to put your name on it, to give it your own title. So a title like that isn’t a particularly useful one. Why don’t we call it something like that? And then put a description in there for the subject, put you in as the author. You can be the manager, put your own company or no company at all on there, and so on. So fill in some of those details and come up with your own version of this. I’ve already done it. Obviously, I had a bit less to do than you because I’ve already got part of the information on there already. And it’s saved as Example 7. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 17 – Find and Replace Video: Go to; Find and Replace Options Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Find and Replace. If you’ve used a recent version of Excel, 2007 or 2010, then the functionality hasn’t very significantly changed in this version. So you might well skip this section or perhaps just work through it very quickly. For everybody else, then I suggest you follow this because apart from Find and Replace, we’ll look at a couple of other useful associated features as well. Now what we’re going to look at, first of all, is on the Home tab. If you select the Home tab and then at the right hand end you’ll see in the Editing Group a Find and Select button. If you click on that you get a little menu. And the contents of that menu are very interesting in that there are several commands on there. We’re only going to look at one or two of them in detail here. But some of them are actually interesting perhaps for you to look into on your own. There’s a Group in the middle, Formulas, Comments, Conditional Formatting, Constants, Data Validation. Formulas and Comments you’ll know about. The others won’t mean much to you at the moment but they will a little bit later on. These are useful ways of finding the occurrence of, for example, formulas. So if you click on that one, Finding Formulas, it will actually highlight to you and take you to the cells that have got formulas in them. Now all the members of that group and commands do that sort of thing. And if you’re dealing particularly with a large workbook, those Find and Select features are useful. Another very useful feature on this little Menu here is the Go To. Now the Go To let’s you go to, for instance, the name that I’ve defined here. I can go to the name Rate per Mile. So if I want to see where that is click on OK and it’ll take me to Rate per Mile. And that is where the name Rate per Mile is defined. If I go into again into Go To, if I then click on Special, it will let me go to a number of different occurrences of different types on features in my workbook. So there are several commands on that menu that are very useful in terms of finding specific features you want to in your workbook.


Learn Excel 2013 Now we don’t have time to go through all of those here but I do want to look at Find and Replace. And that’s what we’re going to start with and we’re going to start with Find. Now as you’ll see whether you select Find or Replace, there you finish up with this Find and Replace dialog. And the principle behind the Find and Replace dialog is that if you want to find something in a workbook and you want to Replace it with something else either as a one off or perhaps repetitively throughout the whole workbook or maybe throughout one worksheet, this is the dialog you use to define what you want to find and what you want to replace it with. Now let’s take a very simple example. Let’s suppose that on this mileage sheet that we’ve been working on we want to change Branch Office to Local Office everywhere it occurs in this mileage claim. Now our first step is to find Branch Office wherever it occurs; so let’s suppose I just put in the word Branch. If I say Find Next, watch what happens. It finds in this case the first occurrence of Branch and it’s in that expression Branch Office. If I say Find Next, Find Next, it will take me through them one at a time and if I’m looking for a particular one that’s a good way of finding it. If I say Find All then what it’s going to do is to find them all and basically give me a list of them down here. Now that list let’s me look for one in a particular place, Cells B18, C20, and so on. So I can see where all of those occurrences are. It gives me a list of them. And it also tells me at the bottom there that 13 Cells were found. So that in its simplest form is how to find something. Now I can, of course, pull that down a little, see that list a little bit better. Supposing now though that I try the Options, Options button on the right there, because apart from trying to find the word Branch I may have some other specific things to specify. For example, am I looking at the current sheet or do I want to look in the whole workbook? That’s the key decision to make. Let’s suppose I say sheet in this case because there is only one sheet in this workbook. But if there was more than one and I wanted to look for what I’m looking in more than one, I would specify workbook. Do I want to search by rows or by columns? So as I’m going through the succession, Find Next, Find Next, Find Next, do I want to go down the columns or across the rows? Again, for what I’m doing this doesn’t really matter, but it may be significant particularly if you’ve got a very big workbook or a big worksheet in a workbook. What are you looking in? Now are you looking in formulas? Are you looking in the values? Or are you looking in comments? Now in this case, we’ll be dealing with text, either Formulas or © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Values will give us the same effect. But if I was searching in numbers, then we’ve already seen Formulas and Values in Cells are very different things. So let me just put that on values. Now there are two other very important settings here. One of them is Match case. Now if it says Match case it means that with my search term, Branch, written like that, B-R-A-N-C-H, I’m looking to match the case. If I click on Find Next, what do you think will happen? The answer it finds that next occurrence of Branch Office. But if I said Match case, what do you think would happen? It would say that it can’t find one because there isn’t an occurrence of the word Branch in my workbook without the capital B. So if I wanted to match the case I would have to have capital B, which may be what I was looking for anyway, of course. The other important setting is whether you need to match the entire cell contents. So if I’m looking for branch and I have this checked it will only identify a match if the total content of the cell is just that word Branch. So if I click on Find Next now what would happen? That’s right. It can’t find any cell in which the whole content is Branch with a capital B. So if I uncheck that, do the Search again, then, of course, it will now find that succession of cells with the word Branch as just part of the cells contents. So as you can see that’s a pretty good way of looking for content in a cell. You can make the Find even more flexible and more specific by also specifying a format. There’s a Format button in the top right here. At the moment we’ve got no format set. So we’re looking for the word Branch as part of not the entire cell contents, part of the cell contents in a cell. We’ve got to match the case so it’s got to be capital B, lower case R, etc. And it’s got to be in a cell value. But we can also specify the format and we could, for instance, say the format of the cell must be Text or General or perhaps with a number we might say Currency. If you’re not worried about what the format is you can just clear the format here and it will find it in a cell of any format. Now that’s a good one for you to experiment with. And let’s finish off now just by having a look at Replace. So let me just go back to what the original question was which is I want to replace every occurrence of Branch Office with Local Office. Now the safest way of doing that is to search for the whole term. If I knew that I only used the word Branch in the term Branch Office, I could


Learn Excel 2013 just type in Branch and say Replace Branch there with Local. But that’s probably a little bit dangerous. So let me put my Find term now as Office and then click on the Replace tab at the top of the dialog there. And another set of boxes comes up, Replace With. And I can put in there the term I want to replace it with. Now notice I can also as part of this replace the format as well. So for instance if I wanted something say in Accounting Format, I could replace it with something else in Currency Format or something in Text replace it with the same thing in General. Now clearly there are some things you can’t do, so straightforward text putting it into Currency Format might cause a problem. But within what is reasonable you can also change the format as well. Now on this occasion I’m saying Branch Office replace with Local Office. If I’m absolutely confident in this and say yep, that’s exactly what I want to do. I can just click this button here, Replace All or, and this is normally how I do things, I do a Find Next first to make sure I’ve got the right Find term setup. And I look and I say yep, Branch Office that’s right. I look at that and I say let me do a Replace and see what happens. So this is not the Replace All, this is the single Replace. Click on Replace. Ah yep, Local Office, that’s fine. And when I’m happy that I’ve got it setup, I just click on Replace All, it happens, and it says we made 12 replacements. Of course, the first one of the 13 I did as my test, so 12 more. So I’m happy that it’s done the right thing. So, now there’s a little job for you to do. I’d like you to do that using Example 7 yourself. So do the same Find and Replace that I’ve just done, but also there’s an error on there in the Odometer Start and End readings. I don’t know quite how it happened but the mileage on the car isn’t 41,000 and something. Everywhere it should be 31,000 and something. Now I don’t think that will affect my mileage claim in terms of the amount of miles or the amount of money, but we ought to correct that from saying 41,015, for example, to 31,015. So if you’d like to change Branch Office to Local Office and that change as well using the same approach I’d very much appreciate it. And then my attempt at that you can see in Example 8. And that’s it for Find and Replace. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 18 – Conditional Formatting Video: Applying, Clearing and Managing Rules Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at Conditional Formatting and I’m going to use as an example this class Grade Book. Now if you look at this Grade Book it’s got a load of scores for some quizzes, midterms, essays, and so on. And really to the casual observer it’s just a mass of numbers. It’s very difficult to get a picture, for instance, of which members of the class are particularly strong or maybe which of the quizzes, midterms, essays got good results, which of them got bad results, and so on. And Conditional Formatting can really help with this. Now the basis on which Conditional Formatting works is that the cells are formatted so that it’s possible to compare them visually with each other. Now the comparison can be based on all sorts of things. It can be based on just how big the numbers are, so the highest scores in this case will have one color, the lower scores will have a different color; maybe a sort of spectrum of colors in between them. It can also be done on the basis of data bars, icon sets, and so on. And probably the best way to do it in relation to this particular example is to work through a couple of examples, to show the sort of thing that we can do with a data set like this one. Now what I’m going to do, first of all, is I’m going to just choose one of the quiz results. So I’m going to go from Cell B2 down to B20 and just show you Conditional Formatting on that. So we go to the Home tab, to the Styles Group, and in the Styles Group at the top there we have Conditional Formatting. Now with Conditional Formatting, we have a number of options. We have the option to highlight cells. We have the option to highlight the top and bottom, to put in data bars that represent the relative merits of the scores in this case, to format using color scales, or to use icon sets. Now in each of these cases, we’re basically building up a rule and therefore we have a set of commands to manage those rules. We can create a new rule, we can clear rules or we can just go into Manage Rules which enables us to set the rules that we’ve got setup. So just as an example for this first one, let’s do a straightforward case of color scales. And we get a choice of the color scales that we want to use. Let’s go for say that first one. Now if I hover over, it you can pretty much see the general idea of that particular color scale. You notice © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 the green ones, the green scores; the greenest scores. There’s a score of 94 and an even higher one of 98. Now notice how as you move away from 98/94, 87 is also a green score but it’s not as green. The level of green has gone down and then right near the top 82, oh the green is almost gone. Then you move into a yellow or amber color scale. As you go down through the 70’s and the two lowest scores, the two 43’s are shown in red. So that’s a very straightforward way of doing Conditional Formatting to adopt a rule like that one. So let me just tick on that and that rule is now in place. Now let me choose the second set of results. Again, repeat this exercise. Go back to Color Scales again. I chose their color scales green, red, and yellow. You can just about see them on the little icons to the right of the drop down menu there. There are other color schemes that you can choose, including some where not everything is colored in and some of them which leave white. So there’s one which really highlights the lowest scores there in red. But the higher ones are in deeper and deeper blue. So the color scale there as the screen tip tells you is blue-whitered color scale. Apply a color gradient to a range of cells. The color indicates where each cell values falls within that range. So to some extent which color scale you use will depend on, for instance, what your own personal preference but also whether you’re maybe merging this in with some other document with some kind of color scheme. But that’s pretty much how this color scale approach works. One of the other main options here, let’s next look at data bars because data bars also you have choice of colors. You can also use a Gradient Fill. I’m going to use a Gradient Fill in this case. But here the relative merits of the scores are based on the use of data bars. So let me go for the, the first one there again which is a sort of blue with a gradient, select that, I’ll click away. Now what you can see there is that the highest scores virtually fill the width of the cell. So Cell C5 a 97%; you see the very wide bar there which almost fills the cell. And then the lowest score which is C16 you’ve got a relatively short data bar. And then the third main option, if I select the third set of results and again Conditional Formatting is Icon Sets. And this is where you use a set of icons to indicate how good a particular score within a set. Now you have directional icons, arrows, colored arrows, gray arrows, circles, triangles, tick, exclamation mark, cross warnings, and so on, green-red-yellow © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 flags; various other ones here. Even ones that are a bit like you’d see on your wireless network connection at home. Let’s go for that one, the wireless network connection set. There are five in that set. So No Signal’s the lowest, then you’ve got one bar, two bars, three bars, four bars. So click on that, click away, and again you can see the highest scores, the ones in the 90’s, have got the sort of full four bars on their little icon set and the lowest scores have got no bars on the icon set. Note how you still see the number in this case next to the icon. So really they’re the three main possibilities. Obviously, there are many different sorts of icon and obviously with all of them, you can change the colors. But that’s basically the three main options. Now once you’ve applied a set of Conditional Formatting Rules to some cells, it’s quite easy to clear it or change it again. Let’s go to the last set that we’ve here, the ones with the little icons on them. Go back into Conditional Formatting and we’ve got an option just near the bottom there, Clear Rules; Clear rules from selected cells. So if I just wanted to clear all of those Conditional Formatting Rules, choose that option there. There’s also an option, Clear Rules from entire sheet. So if I want to clear all of my Conditional Formatting Rules on this sheet that’s how I do it from there. Now on this occasion, I don’t actually want to clear the rules so I’m going to go into Manage Rules instead. Now, first of all, when you go into the Rule Manager, it shows you the rules usually for the current selection if you have a current selection. You can also choose to show the Formatting Rules for the whole worksheet or if you’ve got other sheets in the book, you can look at the rules on those other sheets. This particular workbook only has a single sheet. So let’s stick with the rules for the current selection and there is one rule at the moment. It’s an Icon Set Rule. The format there shows the icons we’ve chosen to use and it also shows which cells it applies to. This is called the range that it applies to and it’s D2 to D20 as you can see. We could, if we wanted to, delete the rule which would be affectively the same as clearing the rule. We can also go in and edit the rule. So if you click on Edit Rule, it says, first of all, in the top “Select the type of rule.” Now the type of rule we’re using is one that formats all cells based on their values. This is actually a particular type of rule because we can also have rules that only format certain cells. Look at the second one here for example; Format only cells that contain. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 We could, for instance, say I want to use an icon set but only on the top 10% scores. Or I could use a color scheme but I only want it on the bottom 50% or the top 50%. So you don’t have to apply the same rule to everything in the selection. We’ve started off with a very straightforward rule that says Format all cells based on their values. The second part gives us what the rule description is. So, format all cells based on their values. That’s what we’ve got as our selection. The style we’ve got is icon sets. That’s opposed to the other options that we looked at earlier on as we used in the first one which was the color scales or the data bars which we used in the second one. So there are our basic choices, although with the color scale we can have a two color scale or a three color scale. Let’s suppose we want to stick with icon sets but we want to change the icons. So let’s say we wanted to change to this colored icon set here. We then have a definition of when we will show each of these different colored icons. So we’ve got green when the value is greater than or equal to 75, yellow icon when it’s greater than or equal to 50, red when it’s less than 50, and black when it’s less than 25. That’s percentage of the total. So it actually looks at the scores in the range that we’ve looked at and says the percentage of the scores in the overall range, the overall selection. So let’s click on OK and see what that looks like now. Click on OK to confirm the change to the rule. Let’s click away and there we are. So the good scores have got the green circles and we’ve the amber circles, the red circles, and, of course, the very worst ones are the blacks. Now it’s important to note that that’s based on percentages. Let me just select that again, Conditional Formatting, go back into Manage Rules, go back into this Rule again, Edit the rule again. If I didn’t want to use percentages and in fact what I wanted to say was I want an actual number. I want you to show as green all the scores that are over say 80. And I want you to show as yellow all the scores that are over say 60. That says an actual number. The scores over 40 as an actual number will be the red ones. Okay. And then that means the black ones will be the ones under 40. So that’s based on actual scores rather than percentages. Click on OK, click on OK again. Watch the changes to the colors there now as I do that. And you’ll see in fact there’s nobody with a score below 40, which is good. And the red ones, there’s a 56 there and a 58 near the bottom. So that’s based on actual scores rather than percentages. Now there’s just one other thing I’d like to show you here. I’m going to choose one of the other tests here, let’s go for that one. Conditional Formatting again and this time I’m going to go into © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 the Top/Bottom Rules. And I’m going to choose one of these. I’m going to choose Top 10%. And what I’m going to say is Format Cells that rank in the top. Now you don’t have to stick with 10%. You could say this top say 20%. And then you can choose how to highlight those. Light red fill with dark red text. Green fill with dark green text. What about that? Click on OK, click away, and you’ll see just about the green text there. Obviously, the fact that there’s this slight shading in this table doesn’t help in this case. Having selected that, I’m going to select it again, Conditional Formatting, Top/Bottom Rules. I’m now going to say Bottom 10% and I’m going to say the bottom 20% I want to do light red fill with dark red text, click on OK, and now I’ve got some shaded green, some shaded red.

Let me just select it again, Conditional

Formatting again, Manage Rules again, and now I see that for this particular selection I have two rules in place, one for the bottom 20%, one for the top 20%. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t have several rules in place for one selection. And there’s a little check box on the right here, Stop if true. This is quite important. What it says is if you’ve got a particular cell that satisfies one of these criteria, once you’ve found one of the criteria that’s true you stop at that point. So if something’s been flagged as red, you don’t go ahead and check that it’s green. Okay there’s plenty there for you to experiment with on Conditional Formatting. I’m going to leave you with an exercise to do now. I’m going to save this sheet as Example 9. Just before I do let me just make things a little bit easier for you. I’m just going to select in the body, here Cell Styles, put that back to Normal so you can see a little bit more easily what I’ve done. I quite like this system here with the greens, yellows, and reds. Of course, if anybody had got a score below 40, they would’ve got a black. What I’d like you to do is just select those. I don’t want to give you too many clues. And then I’m going to say Clear Rules from the entire sheet so everything’s gone. I would like you to apply a rule to all of the scores on this sheet which basically is some kind of green-yellow-red-black rule like the circles we used just now. Green for a score over 90, that’s not percent, that’s an actual score of 90; yellow for a score over 70, red for a score over 50, and black for a score below 50. And I will save my answer to this as Example 10. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 19 – Graphing and Charting Video: Chart Types; Chart Recommendation Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. This is the first section now on charts. And I think most people that have been using Excel for a long time will say that charts really are one of the great strengths of Microsoft Excel and have been through many versions. It’s obviously very important to be able to enter data, edit data, gather data, present it as rows and columns of numbers, and to analyze it. But very often the key step in the presentation and in many cases interpretation of data is to give it a very graphical form to get that message over as a strong picture, and this really is one of the areas where Excel can really help you. Now in the time available on this course, we couldn’t possibly cover all aspects of charting in Excel 2013, but I’m devoting quite a bit of time to it because it’s such an important topic. And one of the helpful things about looking at charting in Excel 2013 is that many of the principle that you learn early on are the key ones for later on as well. So once you get some of these basics under your belt, you’ll find that the rest of it is much easier to assimilate. So, let’s start with a couple of straightforward examples. And we’re going to start with some data about Africa. Now the data I have here on this first sheet include data about the lengths of some of the main rivers in Africa. Column A lists the names of those rivers including, of course, the Nile, the longest. And then you have the lengths in kilometers. I’m going to select the data, just the first two columns. The third column is the area of the drainage basin of each of those rivers. They don’t all have figures here for the drainage basins.

That’s mainly because of the rivers

themselves. So I’ve just selected the lengths for now. And if I go to the Insert tab there is a whole group there called Charts. Now this is one area where I’m going to start with the one brand new features of Excel 2013, because one of the things that Excel can do now if you select some data is to recommend types of chart to you. And I want to look at that recommendation system first because in many cases, it’s going to prove very helpful. So let’s click on Recommended Charts and it comes up, first of all, with a selection of charts and one of them is highlighted. This is called a Clustered Column. Now a lot of the terminology © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 here, I’m afraid, is going to take us a little bit of time to get through. But once we’re through it, it won’t be too bad. Column charts are basically, as the name implies, columns. If you look at this particular case, the names of the rivers are along the bottom and the lengths in kilometers are here. And that’s a straightforward way of comparing the lengths of those. You can see the Nile is the longest and the Congo then the Niger, Zambesi, and so on. We also have a second recommended chart here and this is called a Bar Chart. In fact, this is a Clustered Bar. Pretty much the same as the column in principle, but here the names of the rivers are down the left and along the horizontal axis we have the lengths. The next one is one I’m sure you’ve seen before and it’s called a Pie Chart. Now in this particular case, a pie chart would be a very bad choice. So one of the things you need to be careful with the recommendations is that Excel will sometimes recommend charts that are totally unsuitable for your purpose. The clue here is in the words below the pie chart. A pie chart is used to show proportions of a whole. Use it to show numbers that relate to a larger sum and always equal 100%. If the total of all of those rivers, the total length was the total of all rivers in Africa, then you might say this is how the total length of all rivers in Africa is divided up between these ones. And then it’s got the names Okavango, Zambesi, Nile, and so on. But that isn’t the case. A pie is for when you’re slicing a whole of something into parts. That’s not what we’re doing here. That would not be a good choice. So given these three recommendations, we can rule that one out straightaway. Either of the other two would be a perfectly valid type of chart for this type of data. I think many people would prefer the bar because the bar pretty much removes any tendency to think of this as something that’s changing over time. And the lengths of the bars are proportional to the lengths of the rivers, so it’s a good physical manifestation of the actual river lengths. In the language of Excel the rivers, in this case, are what are called the categories and the lengths are what are called the values. So we have categories on this vertical axis and values on this horizontal axis. With the column chart they’re the other way around. I don’t think there’ll be a particular complication here in thinking that this is a time axis along here, but some people would probably prefer the bar to avoid any kind of confusion or ambiguity. Now on the other tab within this dialog, we have All Charts. And on this one we can see how any of the other types of available chart will look. Now you need to be a little bit wary here because given a particular selection of data you wouldn’t necessarily be able to draw every type © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 of chart that Excel can do. I’ll quickly run through these. Column, we’ve looked at of course; that’s the one there which we saw before. Along the top of the page with column selected there are different versions of the column chart. Now in this case, you won’t see an awful lot of variation between them and some of them work in a way that might not be immediately obvious. I’ll be explaining them to you later on. But with each of these, let’s say the Line next, with each of those there are alternatives, click on the alternative to see how they look. Now the Line, for example, would be another really bad example. Because if you look at that, you can see how it implies that there is some sort of continuous variable going on there and there is some sort of variation in length over those categories. So Okavango to Orange, and it’s got sort of lengths in between the categories. It’s completely unsuitable for that sort of data. The pie we saw before. bar we saw before. Area chart, well, again it implies all sorts of things that are there. Scatter maybe. Stock, well, it’s not a stock chart. You haven’t got high-low-close values so it can’t draw anything. Surface chart it can’t draw. Radar it draws something there but it wouldn’t mean much. And combo again it can’t do that. So the All Charts tab here shows you some of the other types of chart that you could draw given that the data selected. It will also indicate that some types of chart couldn’t be drawn. So let me just cancel that for the moment. I’ve still got the same data selected. Let’s look now again within the Charts Group and you can see that the types of chart are here. There’s a little icon for each of them and with each of those there’s a drop down which gives me a choice of the type. So if I’m looking for column charts, it shows me 2-D column, 3-D column, and then with More Column Charts it comes up with a full array and the relevant section of the All Charts tab in the Insert Chart dialog. So that’s a pretty useful way of getting into there as well. If you’ve got a good idea of which sort of chart you want, then you can go straight to it by going in there. Note also that in the bottom right hand corner of the Charts Group there is a Launcher. And the Launcher takes you into the same dialog again. So, many ways of getting into looking at potentially what a particular chart is going to look like. So I’ve still got the same selection there. I want you to notice something about this as well. I’ve got the names of the rivers here in Column A but A1 itself is empty. The length in kilometers at the top here is if you like the Label. That tells me what the numbers represent. And the numbers themselves are in Column B. Just bear that in mind. Now I’m going to select that data again. I © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 am going to go for a column chart. I’m not going to use Recommended Charts. I’m going to choose one myself and I’m going to tick. I’m going to go for 3-D column like that one. Now as I choose the one that I want you see, I get a preview of what that one will look like. That’s the one I’m going for. And I’ve actually now created that chart. Now when you create the chart it’s created in a way that it sort of hovers over the worksheet that you’re working on. There are some buttons on the right here that we’ll be looking at a little bit later on, the plus and the one there with a pen on it, Chart Styles; that one which is Chart Filters. And in fact we’re going to be formatting the charts for most of time really because the formatting of the charts is a really important aspect of making them do a good job. But, first of all, let’s look at some basic things about a chart that you’ve created. I’m hovering over this one. Note it’s got a screen tip there, Back Wall. The chart, this is a 3-D one, is as though it’s in a rather thin room and that area there is what’s called the Back Wall. If I point over on the left here, it’s a Side Wall. If I hover over there that’s the Vertical or Value Axis. Down here that’s the Horizontal or Category Axis. Hover over one of the bars and it tells me what that particular point is, the series, length, kilometers, point, Niger, value 4184. It tells me what the value of that particular entry in the chart is. It says the river Niger is 4184 kilometers long. If I go up to the top it tells me that is the Chart Title and that’s why I pointed out what I did earlier on. It will sometimes use something that’s probably quite inappropriate for a title but we’ll deal with that a little bit later on. And the other thing to notice about this is that there are sizing handles and it’s actually very straightforward by dragging with those sizing handles to change the size of the chart that’s been created. Now as you can see this particular chart which I’ve just resized is sort of hovering over the sheet with the data on. One of the very useful options sometimes is to put the chart in a different place; in fact to give it its own sheet. If you make sure you have the chart selected, which means you can see the sizing handles around the edge. You will also see with the chart selected that you get two additional tabs that relate to working on charts. They’re called the Chart Tools tabs. There are two of them. There’s a Design tab and a Format tab. Now we are going to be looking at both of these. Let’s start with the Design tab. One of the options on the Design tab is Move Chart. When you do Move Chart, you have a choice. You can either move it to a new sheet. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 You can give the sheet the name you want. So I could for instance call it River Chart or you can make it a separate object within one of the existing sheets. So at the moment it’s within the River Sheet. Of course, you could put it on any one of the other sheets that are available in this workbook and there are quite a few actually. But let’s go for the option of new sheet called River Chart, click on OK, and what happens now is we have a brand new sheet in the workbook to the left of the one we were on. And this sheet is now a particular type of sheet called a Chart Sheet. It doesn’t work like regular worksheets in a workbook. It is just for a chart. It doesn’t have the normal cells where we can work in. It’s just something to hold a chart. Now sometime that’s a very useful way of doing things because particularly once you’ve worked on the formatting, got it the way you want, you want to print it out, you don’t need to worry about the fact that it’s hiding data behind it or perhaps if you want to work on the data separately you have to keep moving the chart around. So the option of putting it on its own chart sheet is very often a good way of working. And the other thing, of course, as I’m sure you’ll guess, is that there’s no reason that you shouldn’t put this chart and/or its data into a different workbook as well. So, in this section we’ve created our first chart. We’re now going to move on to formatting and adding additional information to this chart and then looking at other types of charts using other data. So I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Basic Formatting Toby: Welcome to our second section on Charts in Excel 2013. In the previous section, we created this chart showing the lengths of some African rivers and we’ve got it on a separate chart sheet in a workbook. And we’re going to start this section by doing a little bit of formatting work on the chart. There are quite a few things wrong with it. For instance the title isn’t right. But I’m really going to concentrate the design elements, first of all. Now as I pointed out towards the end of the previous section, when you have a chart selected you have Chart Tools. And the Chart Tools consist of these two tabs: Design tab and a Format tab. And at the moment we’re going to go for the Design tab. Now I resized this chart, made it a little bit bigger before. If you find something’s difficult to work on you can either change its size or of course you can change its zoom. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to reduce that. It’s currently 81, 70%. That’s fine. I can now see the whole of the chart. You may find the names on the bottom here, the names of the rivers difficult to read, but that’s one of the things we’ll come back to a little bit later on. So there’s my chart. With the chart selected, I’m going to select the Design tab and we’re going to look at some of the options here on the Design tab. Given the type of chart and this is a 3-D column chart, right in the middle there is a section called Chart Styles and this is basically a gallery of the available ways that a 3-D column can look. Now watch live preview as I hover over them. If I click the bottom right hand corner here, the one that’s got a More Screen Tip, I’ll get a list of all the available types. So as I hover over them I can decide which one I like the look of. I think I quite like that one actually, that’s Style 12. And then in addition to choosing the Style, I have a button over here to change colors. Chart Quick Colors, Customize Color and Style. And with this one I basically have two groups. I have a Colorful Group. Each Row represents the sort of color palette for the particular chart that I’m working on. Colorful, for instance the top one there gives me a mix of colors for different aspects that I might use in my chart. The monochromatic section, the longer section down there, means that if you choose one of these you basically get one color. So if I wanted to stick with a primarily sort of blue range, which is the top range there. Again, it’s got live preview. Maybe I’ll go down and try, I’ll maybe try that one.


Learn Excel 2013 So we’re still with this chart and we’re still on the Design tab. Let’s now go to the first button over here on the left, Add Chart Element. And that gives us access to defining, modifying, removing various elements of a chart. We have the axes, the axis titles, chart title, data labels, a data table, grid lines to the chart, and legend. I’m going to go through each of these. I’m not going to dwell on them for a long time because it would indeed take a long time to go through all of them; a great area for you to experiment with. Let’s start with chart title. Now at the moment the chart title we’ve got was something that Excel 2013 picked up and it currently, you can tell which one I’ve got at the moment because you can see the button that’s highlighted in the fly out menu there is Above Chart. Now, let’s go into the bottom option there, More Title Options. We have a box around the current title and one thing you can do is click inside there and we could actually type what we really want the title to be. Okay I think that’s a much better title. And still working on that title, let’s do a little bit of formatting on it itself, let’s look at Fill, first of all. At the moment the Fill setting is automatic. Supposing I go for a solid fill. Now at the moment it’ll use one of the colors from the palette that I chose. Go into the color picker down here and it’s got that one. Let’s go for a lighter one, say that. I can also change the transparency if I want to. Okay. That’ll do for Fill. And then for the line, the border around the title it currently has automatic. What about saying No Line around it? Let’s see how that looks. That’s fine. So when I finish working with this particular panel click on Close and I’ve now got a much better title than I had before. Okay back to the next Chart element. Let’s look at the Axis Titles. Now at the moment we don’t have any axis titles. We can set a Primary Horizontal or a Primary Vertical. Notice as I hover over each of them, Primary Horizontal for example, an axis title appears but it just says axis title. Now you could argue that in a chart that’s called Lengths of African Rivers the fact that it says at the bottom Okavango, Orange, and so on pretty much gives you a clue that that is the axis with the rivers on it. I suppose some purists would say it should say River in the axis title. But I don’t think I’m going to put an axis title on there. However, on the Primary Vertical Axis, I think there’s a good case for having a title because you haven’t actually explained what the units are. So we’re going to go for Primary Vertical and one thing to notice about that is that involves putting text on its side, which is absolutely no problem in Excel 2013. All you need to do is to click within the box. You see the cursor. It’s sort of lying on its side and you have to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 have this rather strange experience of using the up arrow to move along the text if you’re using the keyboard keys. But I can delete the title that’s there and I can put Length, open brackets, kilometers, and I can click somewhere else within the chart and I’ve got my axis title in place. Now I hope that you can see from this some of the ways that you can improve the look and feel of a chart. I should point out before we go any farther, I’m doing this on the separate chart sheet but all of these facilities are available if I’d left the chart on the original sheet. So hovering over the rivers data I would have been able to do just the same things there. What I’m going to do now is go back into Add Chart Element again. There’s still a couple of things to look at. I want to look next at Data Table. And this is a very interesting option, particularly if you put this on a separate sheet because you can, for instance, say at the moment it says None. Supposing I said “Data Table No Legend Keys” what you get, I’ll just choose that option. I’ll undo it in a moment. If you look down at the bottom, you’ve actually got the table with the data in it. So it gives you each of those lengths in the form of a table under the chart. Now as we’ll see later on with some charts where you’ve got a lot more data and you haven’t just got one river, one length, you’ve maybe got several values associated with a category. Having the data table there can be really useful. In this particular case, it doesn’t help very much because you’ve only got the length of each river. So what I’m going to do is go back here, go back to Data Table, and select None again. Now what I want to do next is to look in a little more detail at some of these formatting options. We’ve added a title. We’ve added a label on the vertical axis. Let’s look at what are called Data Labels. Now at the moment each of these columns in the chart, we can see which river it corresponds to. There’s the name at the bottom, Nile there for instance, and then the river itself we can read across to see what the actual length in kilometers is. I removed the data table. We only had it there temporarily, of course. You can actually put a label on each of these blocks with the number, with the length in it. And that’s a good option to look at in terms of what these panels are and the information in these panels. So let’s go back into that again and let’s go to Data Labels and go down to More Data Label Options. And that takes me through to Format Data Labels. Now with Format Data Labels, there are basically four categories of things that I can do and that’s quite typical when we’re trying to format some of these chart elements. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 There’s the first category which is Fill and Border. The second category makes, allows me to put effects on these: Shadow, Glow, Soft Edges, 3-D Format. The third category is Size and Properties, and the fourth category is details of the Labels themselves. Now if I look at the Label options at the moment, I have value selected and I have what’s called Show Leader Lines selected. Now if we take one of these, you can actually move this away from its bar if I want to and if I do that, that’s what a Leader Line is. It’s one of those little lines. And if you’re trying to do something really clever with one of your charts and you need to move a label like that, that’s the sort of option you have. I could, for instance, include in that category name. Watch what happens if I check this check box. I get the Category Name, Niger, comma, 4184. So you can see the level of flexibility you get when you’re formatting even something like Data Labels in Excel 2013. Now you’ve got all these other options. I’m not going to go into them now. You can change the size. You can set these effects like Shadow and Glow. You can set the Fill. You can say whether the labels have got lines around them or not. So I could go for solid fill on the label. I could choose a nice light color, etc. So there are many things you can do with every one of these potential elements that you can add to a chart. So there are still a few elements on our chart element that we haven’t covered; things like legend for example and grid lines. One or two of those are pretty straightforward; Primary Major Horizontal Grid Lines. If I also put on Primary Major Vertical Grid Lines, you’d get grid lines in both directions, of course. I don’t think the vertical grid lines help very much in this case so primary major verticals can come off again. And things like axes themselves, we have both axes at the moment. You wouldn’t necessarily always need both axes. But if you look to the right of Add Chart Element, there’s another button there, Quick Layout. And Quick Layout is actually quite handy, particularly when you’re first using a chart or when you just want to do something fairly quickly. You have to look at those thumbnails fairly carefully. But what each of those thumbnails is, is a representation of a certain combination of these chart elements. So if I take, for instance, that one in the middle there, that one says it’s got a title but it hasn’t got a legend. A legend is the little box on the right. So if I go back to the first one again, that’s got a legend. Now the legend on the right here doesn’t help much. You can see there it just says length kilometers. I’ve got a title. I’ve got a legend. I’ve got grid lines. If you look at the one in the middle at the top, I’ve got a title. I’ve got a legend under the title. Note © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 that’s what the little thumbnail there means. I’ve got no grid lines at all on that one and I’ve got horizontal axis but I’ve got no vertical axis. Now if you hover over each of those thumbnails it has a different combination of those key chart elements. And sometimes just by clicking on one of those you can quickly get the combination of elements that you want. Now I hope you get the idea here. There’s obviously many, many combinations of these on the Design tab. And the other point to bear in mind is that with each of the other types of chart, you can use the Design tab but the options that are available will be different. The sort of thing you get with a pie chart is very different from that which you get with a column chart. And in fact in the next section we’re going to look at some of those other chart types and the features of them. While we’re in the Design tab, just one other thing to point out; there’s a straightforward option here to change the chart type. So if you wanted at this point to say, no, I’m not going to use a column chart after all. I’m going to use something else. You could go into the dialog there and change that type while you’re still in the Design tab. And there’s just one other thing I’d like to point out now. If you haven’t actually got the Design tab selected, let’s say you’re on the Home tab or something like that and you’re looking at a chart. You can still do many of those things. For instance, these three buttons that I mentioned earlier, that one is the Chart Elements button so that basically does what the Add Chart Elements button does. That one will do Chart Styles for you. So if I click on that, I get access to the Styles. And this one, which we’re going to talk about a little bit later on, is the Chart Filters button whereby you can decide which data points are visible on your chart. The other thing is if you right click on the chart, you get a contextual menu that includes a number of these options and in this top section, this sort of special mini toolbar up here you can quickly format chart elements. For instance, back wall is selected there. Back wall. I could go into Fill for the back wall and say ah, I’m actually going to fill the back wall with that color. And then maybe you could go to the side wall, same sort of thing and say ah, I’m going to fill the side wall with the color, and so on. So a lot of the formatting can be done away from the Design tab anyway.


Learn Excel 2013 So, in the next section we’re going to look at some of the other chart types and some other formatting options. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Selecting Data, Positioning and Printing Charts Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. We’ve spent two sections looking at charts and in the second section we looked in some detail at design aspects of charts. In this third and final section in this course on charts, we’re going to look at a couple of the other types of chart and what they’re used for and we’re also going to look at a little bit more about Layouts and Formatting. Let’s start by looking at this information about land use in a number of African Countries. Now you may remember from earlier on that one of the recommendations that Excel 2013 made when I selected some data and said I wanted to insert a chart was for a pie chart and I pointed out that pie charts have really quite a specific purpose. Although they’re used a lot, they’re used in situations where we’re dividing a whole into parts. Now the data you’ve got here relates to land use and the land use, for example if you look at the country Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo here, the first one, Row 2 in the spreadsheet. The total area in square kilometers is just over 2 million square kilometers and it’s divided up into these four categories: Forest and Jungles, Crop Land, Meadows and Pastures, Other. Now this is a very good example where we’re dealing with a total. That total of 2.34 million square kilometers is divided up into those four amounts. Now what we can do in this situation is to draw a pie chart. But in order to draw a pie chart, you’ve got to be a little bit careful about what data you specify. Now one thing we’re not going to need for drawing a pie chart of land use in the Congo is the total area. Now in a situation like this, it’s quite straightforward. If I right click on Column B I can hide it, at least temporarily. And now I have my four constituent figures for the four categories of land use. Next I select all the data I need, which is basically the first row contains the categories, the second row contains the data related to the Congo. Now if I click on Insert, I could do Recommended Charts. I’m not going to do that on this occasion. I’m going to go straight here to pie chart and if I hover over it, I see the screen tip, Insert Pie or Doughnut Chart. And if I click on the down arrow I can choose a type of chart. There’s a 2-D pie, a 3-D pie, and a doughnut, and then at the bottom there’s selection More Pie Charts. And of course, with each of these if I hover over for a moment I’ll get a preview of what it would look like. Now I’m just on this occasion going to do a 2-D pie chart.


Learn Excel 2013 Now notice what Excel 2013 has done. It’s picked up the categories: Forest and Jungles, Crop Land, Meadows and Pastures, and Other. And for each of those categories, it’s drawn a slice of pie that is proportionate in its size to the amount of land that’s used for each of those four categories. Now as you can see in the Congo, most of the land is forest and jungles. Now I’m not going to dwell on this at this point, but I should just point out that having made a pie chart, of course, it has a very different structure to the type of column chart that we looked in the previous section. So for instance there are no axes on a pie chart. There’s not an option here to go in and add an axis or add an axis title or anything like that. However it does have some things. It has a title. The title up here is Congo. I could go in, right click, edit that. Edit text for instance would let me say something like that. And I can, of course, use all of the same facilities where they are relevant, where they are appropriate that we looked at in the previous section. Similarly if I go down here to the legend at the bottom, I can go into Format Legend and from Format Legend I have various options. Again, we have this panel on the right. I could go in, I could make the text bigger if I wanted the legend to be a little bit easier to read or, of course, I could change the font, the wordings, etc. So all of the same facilities are available in principle, but exactly what’s there will depend on the type of chart. And of course, on the Design tab within the Chart Tools on the Ribbon, the gallery of options for the pie chart is a very different gallery to the one that we saw for column chart but it works in exactly the same way. There’s a range available. I can choose the one that I like the look of. So I could, for instance, go for that one. I can drag to resize the chart if I want to, etc. Let’s look now at a feature we haven’t looked at so far and this applies to all charts, which is there is a way of seeing which data the chart applies to. On the Design tab in the Chart Tools with this particular chart selected, if I click on the Select Data button in the Data Group, I get a little dialog, Select Data Source. And this shows me the source for the chart that I’m currently looking at. In fact, you can see the source; it’s got the marching ants around it. And it’s from Cell A1 to Cell F2 on this sheet, which within this dialog top entry, Chart Data Range equals and then in single quotes land use, an exclamation mark, and then dollar-A, dollar-1 to dollar-F, dollar-2. So land use is the worksheet name and A1/F1 is the range on that worksheet. This is a useful thing to know, particularly if the data that the chart is based on are on a different © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 worksheet or even in a different workbook. But it’s actually very straightforward to change the data source for a chart and that means it’s possible to draw a chart for a different set of data without starting right from the beginning again. Now to the right of this Chart Data Range box there is a little sort of spreadsheet symbol here and if I click, tick on that it lets me specify a different data source. Now this data source is a single rectangular range. Supposing I wanted to draw a pie chart of land use but not for Congo but for Egypt then what I would need to do is to select the same set of headings but the data would be in Row 3 from my worksheet. Now watch how I do that. First of all, let me click in A1 and drag across there, then hold the Control key down, click in A3 and drag across there. And look at how that range has changed. It’s split the range into two parts. It’s got land use A1 to F1, land use A3 to F3. And this basically shows you how range can be made up of a number of smaller ranges and they don’t necessarily need to be contiguous ranges either. They can be separate parts of your worksheet or indeed more than one worksheet. Although, of course, the range has to be appropriate to the type of chart that you’re drawing. So we’ve made a change here. We’ve chosen a different set of data. What we really need to do now is to update the chart. That’s pretty straightforward because all we have to do now is to click back in here. We have our new range selected, click on OK, and we have the data for a different country. And now, of course, in this case because we actually changed the title manually the chart title is now incorrect. It should say, but basically we now have a chart showing land use in Egypt instead of Congo. So what you’ve seen there is that given a particular type of chart, we can change the source data for the chart. We’ve seen how to do it using the Select Data dialog. If you click on Select Data again note that you could manually type a range in here even if it was made up of several parts rather than clicking here on the little icon on the right and doing a straight selection. The choice is yours. The other thing of course we can do, which I have mentioned before, is that we could choose a different chart type anyway. So when it says here Change Chart Type, one of the options there on the pie is to for instance go for the 3-D pie. And if I click on 3-D pie, I keep the same title and I keep the same Design Style but it becomes a 3-Dimensional version of the same chart. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So I’d like to now point out a couple of things about formatting that we haven’t really covered before. We’ve looked in quite a bit of detail at what’s on the Design tab, but we also have this Format tab which has some useful things on it as well. Now we don’t have enough time on this course to go through all of this, but some of these topics will come up later in terms of working with Shapes and WordArt later on in the course. But one thing to point out is that when you have a chart it’s actually made up of a number of objects. When you’re looking at the chart in general, so you’ve got the handles on the outside for example, you normally have what’s called the Chart Area selected. If you hover over it you can see that there is a screen tip there, Chart Area. If I select within this part, note the screen tip now says Plot Area. The plot area is really an area within the chart area. If I select within the pie then I have something else selected and what I have here is the Data Series. It’s effectively got the points that correspond to the figures in my data table. Now whatever you’ve got selected, you can click up here on the left in the Current Selection Group on the Format tab to format the selection. So for instance with the series selected, I would be able to go into Format Selected and the Format options that I’ve got here are for the Data Series. So for instance, I can change the angle at which the first slice begins. It normally starts at 12 o’clock if like right at the top. I could change it to start at say 90degrees. Now clearly there are many, many, many such options and I’m not going to go into them now. You can do things like do pie explosion where bits of the pie explode out from the center. And as I say there’s no time to go through those now. There are many, many of those but they’re well worth experimenting with in terms of the options for further formatting of a chart. So just one or two other things to quickly point out here; one of them is if you have a chart selected, you can print it. If you go into Backstage View, go to the Print option. You’ll find that the print option says Print, and then it says Only print the selected chart. Now if you’ve got the chart on a separate chart sheet on its own, you can actually print it as part of an operation to print the entire workbook because it will print out as a separate sheet. But if you’ve got it overlaid over data, you’ll normally want to just print the selected chart on its own without the data behind it, which is what will happen in this case. Now I just want to show you something else here. This is the data, again I’m going to choose all of the data this time about land use and I’m going to create another chart. I’m going to do Insert, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Recommended Charts, and I’m going to choose the first one, Clustered Column. Now you should be able to see that okay but I’m going to make it only a little bit bigger for a very specific reason. Now look at the data we’ve got here. We’ve got the five countries and the four categories of land use. In the Clustered Column here, we have a cluster of columns, that’s four columns for each country. And the four columns represent the land use of each of the countries. Now when you’re dealing with data like this, you’ve effectively got three things. You’ve got the land use represented by the columns, the countries represented by the rows, and the actual values are the numbers in the table here. Now if I wanted to, I could plot this the other way around. Let me show you what I mean by that. Switch Row and Column is a command in the Data Group on the Design tab. And if I do Switch Row/Column watch what happens. I get all the same numbers but this time the groups are the categories of land use. So Forest and Jungles is now divided into the five countries. Crop land divided into the five countries, etc. We don’t have the separate countries each divided into their land use. We have it the other way around. Sometimes you may want one; sometimes you may want the other. In this case, I’m going to switch it back to the way it was and I’m also going to change the chart type again. So I’m going to go into Change Chart Type and I’m going to change from a clustered column to a thing called a stacked column. Now with Stacked Column, the total for each of the countries is represented by the overall height of the column. And within each column, the land use is a colored bar, a colored band within that. So in the case of Congo, the biggest band is the red band which is Forest and Jungles, then we have a smaller one for Crop Land, slightly bigger than Crop Land Meadows and Pastures, and then other is the blue at the top. Libya has no Forest and Jungles. So, that is a stacked column chart. Now here is an example for you to practice on. I want you to take the same data and present it in pretty much that same form but I’d like you to do it as a stacked bar chart. So it’s a stacked bar chart; that means the bars will grow across the page horizontally. Each bar will represent one of these countries. You need to bear in mind what I just showed you about Switch Row and Column. I’d like you to put a good title in and choose a 3-D style, a nice design for this stacked bar chart. So it’s stacked bar, 3-D, good title, and I’d like you to put it on a separate chart sheet. So, my answer to that question is Example 12 and I’ll see you in the next section. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 20 – File Types Video: Saving Workbooks; PDF and CSV Formats Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at some of the alternative file types that can be accommodated in Excel 2013. Primarily, we’re going to look at different formats, different file types for saving workbook data. Let’s suppose that I want to save the content of this particular workbook for somebody to use who doesn’t have the current version of Excel. Excel 2013 uses the same format that’s been in use since Excel 2007. So the last three versions of Microsoft Excel have used the same format. If I wanted to pass this workbook on to somebody who had an earlier version, if I click on File, go into Backstage View, and do a Save As. I’m going to choose Computer. Let’s suppose I’m going to use the same folder that I’ve got the other example files is. Under Save As Type down here, default is Excel workbook style .xlsx, although you can actually change that default in the Excel Options. And there’s a long drop down. In fact, it’s such a long list that you’ll fall off the bottom of the page here. But one of the options there, the fourth one down usually is this one: Excel 97 to 2003 workbook *.xls. This is the Excel format that was in use before the current format. So somebody with an older version of Excel, either 97, XP, 2000, or 2003 would use that format. And if you save this workbook in that format, they should be able to open it just fine. One word of warning there and that is that sometimes some of the content in a newer Excel workbook will not be compatible with an older format. So if a new feature has been introduced and it wasn’t in the older version of Excel then that may not work. And Excel either will warn you about that or will produce something where the person opening it in the older version of Excel may not get the full effect of what you’ve done. Now in addition to that format, there is a format from Excel versions 5.0 to 95 that you can also still save a workbook in for somebody with an even older version of Excel, although I think the number of people that are using version of Excel of 95 or older is probably quite a small number nowadays. So that’s how you would accommodate older versions of Excel. I mentioned much earlier on in the course that you can create your own templates. We did use a template or two earlier on. It’s outside the scope of this course to create your own templates, but if you do you would save those


Learn Excel 2013 using a specific format and file extension as well. Again, we’ll go to the Save As Type list now, about eight items down there, Excel templates, *.xltx. That’s the format you would use to save a workbook as a template. And further up the list, it’s normally the second item on the list, there’s also Excel macro-enabled workbook. Again outside this course, but if you study VBA and writing macros in Excel, you would need to save your workbook in a particular format that accommodates including macros, actual program code you’ve written yourself. And the format for that type is .xlsm. Now there are a number of other formats there. One of them, for example, is saving as a single file webpage, an MHT file or saving as a webpage, an HTM file. So there are many other formats. But there are two in particular or I should say three really in particular that I’d like to look at next in this section. Now so far when we’ve been looking at file types we’ve been looking at saving Excel file types. So primarily for people that have a copy of Excel, maybe an older copy of Excel. And that the different types of Excel workbooks are workbooks, templates, macro-enabled workbooks, etc. What if we want to supply a copy of a workbook to somebody who doesn’t actually have Microsoft Excel installed? So you want to give somebody a copy of your data, in this case the opening times, but they don’t have Microsoft Excel. Well, one very flexible way of doing that is to provide somebody with a PDF file. PDF, portable document format, the Adobe standard which is pretty much the standard for interchanging files in a printable, readable form is accommodated within Excel 2013 and you can quite simply save a workbook in PDF format. Now there are some quite serious restrictions on this. You will not be able to save the actual calculations, formulae, function side of things. It won’t be a working workbook in PDF format. It’ll really be more a printout of the workbook. But in many cases that may be all that you need. So, if I go into the Save As Type drop down and go down, it’s a long way down. It’s off the bottom of the screen here, but one of the options is PDF. I can then choose Options. Now let me click on the Options button here and look at the options to go with PDF. First of all, do I want to do all pages or a range of pages? Let’s say all pages. Do I want to publish what I’ve selected, selected cells, the entire workbook, or perhaps just the active sheet?

Let’s say the entire

workbook. And do I want to include the nonprinting information such as document properties, document structure tags for accessibility, etc? And one of the PDF options is this ISL option © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 here. Now I’m going to stick with the options as they are there, click on OK, and then the other area I’ve got “Optimize for standard”, for publishing online and printing, or do I want minimum size? If I’m going to publish this online probably make it a downloadable PDF file, do I want to make it as small as possible? I’ll stick with standard. There’s another option here, Open file after publishing. I’m going to uncheck that and my file has now been saved as a PDF file. Let’s open up the PDF file and see what it looks like. And what you get is a PDF document on the first page. We have the opening hours for 2013 and then bear in mind that this had two sheets in this workbook. If I scroll down, you’ll see on the second page it says Page 2 of 2 and then there are the opening hours for 2014. Now that is effectively a sort of printout really of the contents of my workbook available in PDF format. Now it’s also possible to save a file in the Microsoft equivalent of the PDF format which is the XPS format. So if you want to give somebody a copy of your data to look at, possibly the charts you’ve generated from it to look at, then PDF format is a good option as is the Microsoft XPS format. What if you wanted to give somebody data that they could actually work on and they didn’t necessarily have Microsoft Excel?

One of the most common ways of interchanging large

amounts of data is using what’s called CSV format. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values. In fact Comma Separated Values is a little bit of a misnomer because it’s possible to format a CSV file in many, many different ways. But if I use the generic term CSV format what you can do with CSV format is to export data in a way that other people can import into their spreadsheet programs, maybe programs that aren’t Microsoft Excel. The other advantage of CSV format is that you can import it into many or in fact most database programs as well. So CSV format is a very good format for interchanging data that is actually going to be processed as data rather than just read or charts looked at, for instance, which you might use PDF format for. So let’s save this is CSV format. So it’s pretty straightforward. Go into Save As, go down to CSV, Comma delimited value, Comma Separated Values, and pretty much it’s as simple as that. So having selected CSV format click on Save and one of the things to note when you do this is that you get this message from Microsoft Excel; “The selected file type does not support workbooks that contain multiple sheets.” To save only the active sheet click OK. To save all sheets save them individually using a different file name for each. That’s an important point about CSV format. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 You need to do each sheet as a separate file. So we’ll click on OK. Another common warning, Some features in your workbook might be lost if you save it as CSV. Do you want to keep using that format? Yes. So for instance, Formatting information will not be kept in CSV format. Click on Yes and the CSV format is saved. Let’s have a look at what the file actually looks like. Now if you open up the CSV file that was generated by that save, you get this. There is no formatting, coloring, bordering information at all. It’s just really the text that’s in the first of the worksheets and the commas indicate the different columns on the worksheet. So this is saying on the first row it says Opening Hours, comma, then nothing, comma, then nothing, then comma, then nothing, and then so on. The second row has got an empty cell, then a comma, then it says Open, comma, then it says Close, comma. So the commas are basically stepping you through the columns. And the other important point about CSV is that it’s a very good format of data to import into Microsoft Excel. So given a CSV file, it will be very straightforward to input a file like this to create a worksheet. Now clearly we wouldn’t be able to import the formatting information, but in terms of the data itself it’s a pretty straightforward format to work with. So that’s it for this section. We’ve looked at different Excel file types including types that are used for older versions of Excel and for particular types of workbook like macro-enabled workbooks. But we’ve also looked at ways of saving your workbooks in formats that people without Microsoft Excel can access either PDF’s so that they look at the data or CSV format where they can take the data and import it into their own spreadsheet program or database. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 21 – Managing Data Video: Sorting Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at Sorting, and in order to demonstrate sorting what I’ve done is to put together a list of courses from a local college for the year 2012-2013 and the course information is made up of seven columns. We have in Column A the title of the course. We have administrations course code in Column B. We have the days of the week that the course runs on, start date, time, number of week, and the fee. And what I want to demonstrate here is how you can sort this information. Now, first of all, in case you’re not quite sure of what I mean by sorting this information, by sorting it I mean sorting it into sequence. If you look at the course title column, for instance, it’s clear that that is not in alphabetical order. It goes A Access, A Access, B BTEC, B, dah, dah, dah, dah, and then it goes down Foundation, Foundation, L2, and then it starts at A again. So it’s clear that this information is not in alphabetical order of course title. You can also see that it’s not in order of course code. Again, just scanning down there you’ll see that’s not in sequence. In fact, you won’t find any of these columns that it’s in sequence on. Now sometimes in order to find or present some information you want to in order on one of the properties of the information, one of the attributes. So let’s suppose for example that I wanted in the first instance to sort this on alphabetical order of course title. If I select Column A which is the course title column, select the Data tab on the Ribbon, and there is a Sort and Filter Group and a very simple first sort is to click on A to Z which just says Sort A to Z, lowest to highest. Now watch what happens if I do that. Now the first thing that it does is to warn me, Microsoft Excel found data next to your selection. Since you have not selected this data it will not be sorted. Now this is a very, very important thing. This means if you just sort it as it is now what you would find is that Column A was sorted and not the others, which would indeed be a very bad thing to happen because all of the data would all get jumbled up. So you need to expand the selection to include the other columns. Now a situation may arise where you actually do want to sort one column and not the others. If that were the case, you would select this second option here, click on Sort, and you would only have Column A sorted. On this occasion, we want to sort the whole lot so © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 we click on Expand the selection. That means the whole thing will be included in the sort. Click on Sort and everything is sorted. Well, almost everything because you will see that Excel 2013 has recognized that the first row is a header row and therefore it hasn’t sorted the header row in with the rest. But if you look down at the rest of the information, you’ll see that all of those course titles are now in alphabetical order. And it’s just as straightforward to do exactly the same sort in reverse alphabetical order using the second button there, the Sort Z to A button. Same again, expand the selection. Yes, we do want to expand the selection, Sort, and everything is now in reverse alphabetical order of course title. Now unfortunately the data that we’re dealing with isn’t always quite as straightforward as this data and sometimes it will be necessary to sort data in a more complex way. If you select a column as we’ve done here and use one or other of those buttons that gives you a very simple way of sorting data. But if you don’t select a column, if you just click somewhere on your worksheet and instead click the Sort button here this gives you a Sort dialog where there are several options. And amongst the options is the option to sort on more than one criterion. Now at the moment by default this picks up the sort order of the last sort order we used which was sort by course title, sort on values, so that’s the words that are actually in the course title, and the order is Z to A; if I wanted to change that back to say A to Z that’s fine. But supposing I wanted a sort on something else altogether; let’s suppose I wanted to sort on fee. What I can do is I could delete this level and say I want to add a level. Now when I do Add level, I then choose the field I want to sort on. So let’s say I want to sort on fee. I can sort on the value, the color of the cell, the color of the font used in the cell, or the cell icon. In this case, it’s values. And of course, Excel knows that this is a numeric column. It knows that these values are amounts. Now in fact, I haven’t got them formatted as Currency but they’re formatted as numbers so they’ll sort fine. And then the order I can have is smallest to largest, largest to smallest, or I can define a Custom Order. Let’s say smallest to largest. And right over on the right here near the top of the dialog there’s a check box there, “My data has headers.” In the case of the Sort dialog, if the data doesn’t have headers, you can uncheck this box to make sure that the first row gets sorted in with the others.


Learn Excel 2013 And then there’s also an Options dialog. Now we’ve got two major Sort Options here. One of them is that we can make the Sort Options case sensitive which means, for example, that capital B, U-S will sort differently from capital B, capital U, capital S. And secondly almost all of the time in Excel you’ll probably sort top to bottom, but you can actually sort in Excel left to right. You can effectively sort the columns into a different sequence. Now we won’t be using either of those options on this course. So just be aware of the fact that you can make the sort case sensitive and you can also sort columns rather than rows. Cancel that and we’re ready to do the sort on the basis of fee. So let’s click on OK and now you can see the courses that are 1,500 are on the right. Then they go 1,520, 1,600, 1,610, and so on. Now if you look within the 1,500’s, that’s the first ten roughly courses, the course titles are not in any particular order. The start dates are not in any particular order. Let’s do a Compound Sort. Let’s do a sort on more than one criterion. So what I’m going to do is to sort on fee first as the first sort criterion, then on start date. You notice how these start dates for the courses which have a fee of 1,500 go 5th September, 12th September, then back to 5th September, 1st of August. Let’s sort by start date next and then let’s sort by course title. So two courses or three courses with the same fee and the same start date they’ll be organized in alphabetical order of course title. So we go into the Sort dialog again. We already have the fee sort in there. Let’s add another level. This will be start date, Values. Again, Excel 2013 realizes that this is a date field so it will sort those as dates. And because it’s a date field, it describes it as oldest to newest. And then we add another level which will be course title. Again, values and because it’s basically a text field it’s A to Z, A to Z. Click on OK and there is the sort. So for the 1,500 fee courses, we have 1st of August, 5th September, September 5th, September 5th, September 5th, September 5th, so on. If you look at the September 5th courses, that’s these ones, you’ll see that the course titles are in alphabetical order. So there we are. That’s Sort in Excel 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Video: Filtering Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. We’ve looked at Sorting in Excel 2013 and in this section we’re going to look at Filtering. Now when we looked at sorting, one of the main advantages of sorting is that it makes it easier to find what you’re looking for if things are sorted into a sequence. If you have a very, very large amount of data and, of course, bear in mind with Excel 2013 you may be dealing with even hundreds of thousands of rows of information. And each of those rows of information may indeed contain thousands of columns of information. Then finding what you want can be a really big job. One of the tools available with Excel 2013 that helps with this is the use of filters. And in this section we’re going to look at the basic ideas of filtering. The principle of filtering is that rather than look at all of the data in a particular set of data on a worksheet, you can identify data that satisfies certain filter criteria and you can concentrate on those data. And what I’m going to do is to demonstrate that with two or three examples on this relatively small amount of data that we have here about the courses run at the local college. And of course, although this is a relatively small amount of data, everything that I show you here will be extendable to very much larger data sets as all. So let’s look at what filtering allows us to do. In this case, I’ve selected all of the columns of data and on the Ribbon on the Data tab in the Sort and Filter Group we’ve already looked at the left hand part of that group with sort in it. The right hand part we have filter. And we’re going to press the Filter button, the big button, and what that does is to switch on filtering for the selected cell or cells which effectively means wherever you’ve got a cell selected, that column has a filter switched on. Now you know when there is a filter switched on because if I click away you will see these little drop downs in the top right hand corner of the headers. And if you click on a drop down, let’s click on the drop down here at course title, what we get is a list of all the values in that column, down here in the lower part and in this case with the course title since the course titles are all different it’s basically a list of every value in that column. Now at the top of the list there is an option that says Select All and that’s checked. And that means that every potential value in this column is selected. Now as far as filtering is concerned, when something is selected, it appears in the display in Excel 2013. For this course title column, let me uncheck Select All, watch what happens. If I uncheck Select © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 All, everything is deselected, there’s nothing selected at all in this column. If I now check one individual check box, the first one, AAT L2 Accounting Full Time, just check that and click on OK, watch what happens. All I see is the row that has AAT L2 Accounting Full Time as the course title. That’s the only one that applies. Now look carefully at all the little drop down buttons. The one on Column A is different from the others. It’s changed from just being a drop down to a picture of a filter. This is like in chemistry at school, it’s a filter. And that little symbol we’re filtered on that column. We’ve selected to only show AAT L2 Accounting Full Time. Okay let’s go back into that same filter again and this time let’s select the first three, click on OK, you should be able to guess what’s going to happen here. Of course, we see those, but note this one here we found that we’ve got one name used twice. There is in fact a course called AAT L3 Accounting which has got the code with G11 at the end and we’ve got another one, AAT L3 Accounting but a different course code. So it’s not the same course, it’s got a different code. Same start date, same time, same fee, etc.

So the college is running that same course

concurrently but two classes. Probably it’s a course that’s in high demand and they’re running the course twice. So you can see one of the great advantages there of filtering in that we found that one particular course is running twice and when we applied the filter it appeared twice. Now in the case of Column A, we’re dealing with a text column. What’s in there is basically free text. But there’s a lot of flexibility in what you can do in filtering. So far let me just click on that filter again. So far we’ve looked at selecting from the actual course titles that appear in the column. But just above this list, we have a Search box. So if you’re looking for a particular title, maybe you’ve got a very, very long list of potential course titles here. You can do a Search in there. But you can also apply filters that are specifically designed to be used with text. Now let me give you an example. If I hover over text filters, you can see equals does not equal begins with, ends with, contains, does not contain. I can even build up custom filters. Let me take a specific example. Let’s look at Contains. Supposing I want to find a row where the course title contains the word Accounting. So I can just say find me all the ones where the course title contains Accounting. Click on OK and I’ve now got from that list every course that contains Accounting. Similarly, if I went in again, Text © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Filters, I could say Begins with AAT, click on OK, and there we are. So I can build up text filters in quite a complex way like that and it’s a very flexible and powerful way of filtering. So we’ve done some filtering there on course title. When we finish filtering on one of the particular columns, you can just say Clear Filter from course title and we’re back to looking at the complete set of data. Let’s look at filtering on one of the other columns. Let’s try start date. Start date is obviously a date field and date fields have their own specific filters as well. So again, if I click on the drop down, I’ll see a list of the available dates.

But it’s not a

straightforward list day by day. The way that this list works is that we see a list by year, within the year by month, and then within the month we’ll look at the specific dates. So in this case, if I do Deselect All and I’m looking for the start date of a course, I could say well let’s have a look and see what’s available in August. So I’ve got an August the 1st start date. The other start dates are September the 5th and September the 12th. Supposing I thought, well I want to look for the courses that start on September 12th, click that, click on OK, and I will only see the courses that start on September 12th. Again back into the filter for that. Let me go back to Select All and now let’s look at these date filters above here. And the date filters, there’s quite a long list really. We’ve got equals a date before, a day after, a date between two other dates, tomorrow, today, yesterday, next week, this week, last week, as well as custom filters for dates. So when it comes to filtering on dates, you’ve got a very wide selection to choose from. So let me just clear the filter on dates and we’re back to seeing the full list of courses again. Now when it comes to time, again we can do filtering on time. We could also filter either on the number of weeks or the fee. These are Numeric Fields and they have also a very good set of filters available. Supposing I only want a short course on accounting, let’s suppose that I go for course title. I’m going to say text filters contains and then it’s going to contain the word Accounting, click on OK, and then what I’m going to do as far as weeks are concerned which is a Numeric Field, Number Filters. Let’s say I want to do one that is less than or equal to 24 weeks. I want to do an accounting course that is at most 24 weeks long. Click on OK and I find that there are three. I can see the fees, start dates, etc. So there I filtered on two columns at once.


Learn Excel 2013 So that’s how to apply and use filters on multiple columns in a worksheet and particularly when you’re dealing with large worksheets, I’m sure you’re going to find that the tools related to filters are really going to help you and really going to save a lot of time. Now one or two other things to note about filtering, one of them is when you finished using filters you can go along selectively and clear the filters on each of the columns where you still have a filter applied, but there’s a command up here that does clear and this big button here is the one you used to switch filtering off altogether so that all of those drop downs disappear in the opposite way to the way they appeared earlier on in this section. So click that button again, filtering is switched off, and you can no longer see any of the drop downs. There is also an option here for Advanced Filtering, but that’s outside the scope of this course but maybe one you should investigate if you’re dealing with the sort of volumes and types of data where filtering is really going to help you. So that’s the end of our review of the basic features of filtering in Excel 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Tables Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at the use of Tables in Excel and the first thing I want to do is to explain what we might use a table for. Now sometimes when you’re working in Excel, you’re dealing with a worksheet or a workbook which has a mixture of content. And it’s useful to be able to define part of the content as a self-contained entity, almost like a worksheet within a worksheet really. Now I’m going to use a specific example here and in fact this example is one we’re going to carry through into the next couple of sections. So it’s quite an important example because it’s going to form the basis of quite a good case study about the use of many of the things that you’ve learned in Excel so far. The particular example we’re using is an invoice from a west coast based plumbing supplier and the invoices they supply are to bathroom companies, kitchen fitting companies, and so on. Now within the invoice apart from things like purchase order numbers, contact details, terms of business, and so on, they have a little sort of table in the middle which is a list of the items that are within the order. And what we do in a table is take a section of a document like this and turn it into a table which has an existence of its own if you like. It exists as an entity within the invoice in this case and we can work on it as an entity within the invoice. Now the first thing we’re going to do is to create the table. Let’s look at the content of this invoice here. We have a heading section for the list of products. There’s a product code, a description, the units, the quantity in the order, and the cost. Now these aren’t particularly well aligned at the moment but I’m not really going to worry about that until a little bit later on. I need to select all of the heading, any existing lines in the order, and then I’m also going to include this sort of total section here. Note the costs aren’t currently shown and no total cost is shown either. So if I select from B20 down to F27, I’ve included all of the cells that I want to include. Now I go to the Insert tab and click on Table in the Tables Group. Now that gives me a dialog to create a table. Now note that I could have typed in or used this little button over here that we used earlier on to select the cells for my table if I hadn’t selected them all ready. And I also have a check box here to indicate whether my table has headers or not. My table does have headers;


Learn Excel 2013 so click on OK and the table is created. I’ll just click away and you can see what the table looks like. Now right near the beginning of this section I said that it was a bit like having a worksheet within a worksheet and here you should be able to see that that is pretty much the case because with each of the columns in my table and note that I’ve chosen Columns B to F but I could well have other things over in these other columns on this invoice that are not involved in the table. But for each of those columns I’ve got a drop down and I can go and do filtering and sorting and all of the other things that we’ve looked at earlier on. So pretty much all of the items that are within my order can be treated as the contents of a sort of a little worksheet and I’ve got filtering and sorting facilities and so on. The other important note, I’ve clicked outside the table. If I click inside the table, then I get an additional tab on the Ribbon. If you look at the top, Table Tools, I have a Design tab. Click on the Design tab and I see that I have a number of important options. So let’s look at some of the options. We have here the ability to change the table name. Excel gives it a default name which we can edit here. We can also resize the table. In fact, if you click Resize Table here, you get an option to type in the range or to use that little icon to go in and select a range. But in fact, you can change it by dragging on this handle in the corner here. There’s a whole set of table tools. One or two of them, for instance the one relating to pivot tables outside the scope of this course, there’s also a one shot here to remove duplicates from a table. And this one converts a range, basically turns the table back into a normal range of cells again, which you might find useful if you no longer need the selected cells to be in a table. There’s a group here that deals with external table data where you can basically export what’s in a table to an external file and use it elsewhere. But we’re mainly concerned with the Table Style Options and the Table Styles. And I want to start by looking at the Table Styles. Now if you click on Quick Styles in Table Styles, you get a gallery. I’m afraid it doesn’t all show on the screen here, but you can see almost all of it. You get a gallery of different styles. Now note there are many different features here. Let me hover over some of the members of the gallery to show you.

In the top left, you have the simplest style of all which is the

straightforward black text on a white background. So no fill, just whatever the current font is on © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 a white background. And then if I move to the right, look at the next option. That shows the banding and banding is a common feature of these styles. Most of them have banding. And the other thing about this particular second style is that the header row has got a rule above it and a rule below it. So, many of the styles that you see are a combination of banding and the rules above and below the header. Now some of them also have one or more vertical rules. So if I move down to you can see the vertical rules there as well. And, of course, these are the Light Styles. If you go down to the next one, you get the Medium Styles where there’s a lot more depth to the color. That may or may not suit the style of document that you like to send to your customers if you’re sending them invoices with this sort of thing in. And then right down towards the bottom, you get the Darker Styles where everything is much more deeply colored. Now the option that I’m going to go for here is one that includes the vertical bars as well and all I’m going to do is to choose that one. Now let’s turn our attention to the Table Style Options Group because we can also adapt the look and feel of the table quite extensively with this group. For instance, we have our check box top right here, Filter button. I can very simply remove the filter buttons with that; very useful when you’re working on the content but you probably would want to take that away when you were showing it somebody else. You can also switch on and off the banded columns and banded rows. So we’ve got banded rows at the moment but we could have banded columns as well. We can also emphasize the last column, nothing in it at the moment, but the first column note the text becomes bold. And then we can also indicate whether we have a header row or not. And we also have the option of including a total row. Now if I include a total row, it automatically totals that last column in the table. So if I click on Total Row, that will appear. I have the heading total on the left and there is a formula put in here by Excel for the total of the cost column. I have, of course, here already got this manually inserted row. I’m going to go for the automatic option. So I’m going to delete that row. That’s a straightforward row deletion in Excel. And my table now includes a row that is a total row. Now you can already see that setting this up as a table gives you a lot of advantages. You’ve got the filtering and sorting that we’ve talked about already. But there are some other very real advantages in this approach and I’m just going to show you one or two of them now. If you click somewhere inside the table; let’s say we click there in the unit type column which is © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Column D in the worksheet, and then go to the Home tab on the Ribbon and go across to the Cells Group and click on Delete. You have some new options there. You have Delete Sheet Columns, for example, which if you click that would delete the whole of Column D. But you also have Delete Table Columns. Now watch very carefully what happens if I delete the table column, that’s the column that the selection is currently in which is the unit type column. Just watch what happens if I click on Delete Table Columns. It doesn’t delete Column D; it only deletes the table column. So the table as I mentioned a couple of times already is like a little worksheet within a worksheet. You can work on that without working on the worksheet overall. So you can make changes to the table as an entity without making the changes to the overall worksheet. Now before I forget, let me just undo that deletion. And that again emphasizes one of the strengths of using tables in Excel 2013. And on a similar kind of note, if you look at the total row in the table, note that total formula there. It refers to the cost column without actually saying what the range is. It doesn’t say rows 21 to 26. Let’s suppose I want to put an extra item in the order. If I click on the last row and then on the Home tab in the Cells Group, go to the Insert. There’s Insert Sheet Rows and Insert Sheet Columns, but there’s Insert Table Rows below. Watch what happens if I do Insert Table Rows below. I get a brand new row and in fact the total will still work. The total will be adapted to deal with the additional row. And pretty much when I’m using this invoice template, if you like, within Excel 2013 that means that as I add items to this order the total figure here will be adjusted accordingly. But we’ll be doing that in a little while. Now I just need to do one other thing here and that is to show you about totals. We looked here at the default of having a total shown there for that column. You can actually put a total in any of these columns. So for instance if I click in the bottom of the order quantity column, there’s a drop down there that lets me choose what sort of total I’d like. Now at the moment, I get no total. I could have an average, a count, count of the numbers, a max, a min, a sum. If I put Sum in there, for instance, it would tell me how many items there are in this order. There are 210 items. This one currently has count. So that counts how many entries have none, blank values in there. I want that to be a Sum as well. So I’m going to leave those two with values and then the other columns I’m going to keep with none in them.


Learn Excel 2013 Now there are a couple of other features of tables that I haven’t covered here such as features associated with validating the data that you enter into tables. But for the purposes of this course, that’s all you need to know about tables for the moment. So I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 22 – Functions Case Study Video: VLOOKUP Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. By now we’ve covered quite a lot of the basics of Microsoft Excel. You hopefully have done some of the exercises that I provided and you’re starting to feel more confident in your use of Excel.

One rather

unfortunate thing about Microsoft Excel is that it is a big, very powerful, and quite complex product. And if you’re still quite new to it, there are many, many more things to learn. And I think one of the dangers is trying to take in too much at once and there’s always a good case for getting a bit of practice with what we’ve covered already. So what I’m starting in this section is a small case study to show you how we can use some of the things you’ve already learned together with some new or perhaps more detailed things related to Functions to assist in the production of a business document. Now the business document we’re going to produce is an invoice for our plumbing supplies company. You’ve seen it already earlier on in the course, but now we’re going to start to look at making it not only more flexible and more powerful but also something that could be more likely to be used in a business environment. So first of all, let me explain a little bit about this invoice. We have the word Invoice at the top. There’s our name, Ocean Plumbing. Our address is 2324 Main St. South Park. And this particular invoice is going to Zak Stephens of West Beach Bathrooms. There’s his address. It’s going by courier. The order date is that date. The order number is that. The purchase order number from the customer is that. Contact department there is purchasing and the account number for this customer, 2973, terms are 30 days. Now if I were regularly invoicing West Beach Bathrooms, I’d have all of this information in a database. And for the purposes of this exercise, my database is one of the sheets in this workbook. Now normally I wouldn’t set things up like that but in order to demonstrate how to do this, let’s just go along with my approach for the moment. So let’s assume that the worksheet called Customers here is actually my database of customers. Now I’ve only put four on there at the moment. I’d hopefully have more than four customers, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 but there you are, account number 2973, West Beach Bathrooms, Zak Stephens is the contact. Their terms are 30 days. They do get a discount and there is their address. Now if I were preparing an invoice for West Beach Bathrooms in reality, I wouldn’t type in all of these individual lines and pieces of information for West Beach every time I do an invoice. I might copy an old invoice but it will be much better if I could automatically fill in these cells in Excel. And what I’m going to show you how to do now is how to use one of the cells to help to fill in many of the other cells. Now first of all, what is it about this customer that helps us to identify their information? And in the case of a customer of a company it will usually be an account number. So if I have the account number, in this case 2973, then I can use that account number to find the other information. Now let me just flip back to the Customer Sheet again. On the Customer Sheet the account number is in the first column. What I’d like to be able to do, go back to the invoice, is if I instead of putting 2973 here put say 2972, it would bring up the other information for the other customer. So there was a customer 2972, that’s a company called Bathtime. There’s my contact there. I’d like to automatically bring up that customer’s details and create an invoice for them if I put their account number on here. Let me just put that back to 2073 and then we’ll see how we do that. Now the first field, the first cell that I’m going to apply this principle to is that one, D5. It’s currently the name of my contact at the customer company. It’s currently got typed into it Zak Stephens, but instead of Zak Stephens I’m going to put in there a formula. And the formula will actually be a function. Click on equals, go to Formulas, and the sort of function it’s going to be is a Lookup Function. Now Lookup and Reference Functions are ones that get information basically from elsewhere. And the Lookup Function we’re going to use here is one called VLOOKUP. There are two direct functions. There’s a VLOOKUP function and an HLOOKUP function. We’re going to go for VLOOKUP. Just read the screen tip there. Looks for a value in the left most column of a table and then returns a value in the same row from the column you specify. By default, the table must be sorted in ascending order. Now we are going to be using account number, therefore one of the requirements is that this table of account numbers must be


Learn Excel 2013 in ascending order. That’s pretty straightforward because we can always sort a table if we need to. So it’s the VLOOKUP function that we want. Now when you choose VLOOKUP in Excel 2013, it brings up this very convenient dialog and we can use the dialog to fill in the rest of this. Now, first of all, what’s the value we’re going to look up? Now the value we’re going to look up is the account number which is in C17. If I click in there, where is it going to find it? Now where it’s going to find it is in the Customers Sheet. So if I click on the Customer Sheet and select from the beginning of the table of customer information down to the end, it’s a very small amount of information at the moment. But if I select that, it gives me the table array. What it’s saying is I want you to look up what’s in C17 in the table. It doesn’t actually have to be setup as a table. It can just be a range. The table, customers, that’s on the Customers Sheet, A2 to G5. And as you can see from the marching ants, A2 to G5 covers all of my customers. Now when VLOOKUP does the look up, it always looks up in Column 1. It will look for whatever’s in C17 on the Invoice Sheet in Column 1, so it will only look in the account numbers. But the next question is which column will the answer be in? Here I want in this particular cell the customer contact name and the contact name is in Column C. So which index number that’s 1, 2, 3. That is Column 3, click on OK, and see what I get. I get Zak Stephens. Zak Stephens is, that’s the value but the formula is equals VLOOKUP. C17, that is what do you want to look up? I want to look up the account number. There it is, 2973. Where do I look it up? You look it up in customers bang or exclamation mark, A2:G5; so it’s on the Customer Sheet and it’s in the range A2 to G5. Which column number? Column 3. So far, so good. Let’s see if that works. Let me click in the C17 field and let me now change that from 2973 to 2972, tick, and what I get now is Amit Nehraj in the contact name field. So it’s automatically and let’s do another one, 2971, tick. It’s automatically changing the name here when I change the account number there. Now you can obviously see what the problem here is and that is that we’re sorting out the contact names automatically based on the account number but we’re not doing everything else. And that’s where there’s a little job for you to do on some of the rest of this invoice.


Learn Excel 2013 So what I want to do now is to just take another look at that Customers Sheet again. Note the columns there: account numbers are in Column 1, company name in Column 2, contact Column 3, terms of business in 4, discount in 5. The first two lines of the address in Column 6 and 7 and there could, of course, be many other columns with other information about this particular customer. But I’m only going to use these at the moment. And we’re going to now look at the terms of business column. Now let’s suppose that the next thing I’m going to do is to put a similar Lookup in here. One option is to literally copy that cell. You might look at it and think, well, I’m copying Dorothy Walinski. I don’t want it to say Dorothy Walinski but don’t worry about that at the moment. Let’s do a Control-C to copy it and let’s do a Control-V to paste it and, of course, we get an error. Now, hopefully if you look at what’s in the formula bar, you can see what the error is. Because the error is that with this Lookup, when I’ve moved the Lookup to a different cell, it’s basically used its referencing to change not only the cell reference for the item to look up, the account number in this case, but also the range on the Customer Sheet for the information about customers. So let me undo that and let me go back to the original formula for Dorothy and you should know that what we need to do there is to put in absolute references. Now we can get over it to some extent in terms of the Customer Sheet by referencing it as a table, but let’s put in the absolute references. Just tick that to make sure that Dorothy still works. Dorothy still works. Let’s do a Copy. Let’s Paste that in here. Well that’s better because we now get Dorothy in there. But you should know why we get Dorothy in there and that is because if I tick in this particular cell, so I’m now in E18, the terms of reference are not in Column 3, they’re in Column 4. So if I change that 3 to a 4 and tick and I get 7 days for Dorothy Walinski. Now bear in mind this is 7 days for account number 2971. If I go back to customers 2971 terms are 7 days. So what we have here is Example 13. We’ve just effectively automated the terms and the contact name. What I’d like you to do is to do the same for the name of the client company and for the first two lines of their address. Now obviously this will still be a rather strange invoice because part of it, such as the phone numbers, won’t change. But if you were feeling really, really keen and enthusiastic and if you’ve got the time, you could maybe extend that table out to include telephone numbers or anything else indeed that should be specific to individual customers. You’d, of course, have to change your VLOOKUPs to use the bigger table. But all I © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 really need you to do is to have a go at the name of the company and the two lines of the address, address line 1 and address line 2. And then you can test it as here just by changing the client number. If I put this back to 2973 watch what happens in D5 and E18. When I change that, I get the contact name and the terms change back again. So my answer to that question is Example 14 and I’ll see you in the next section.


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Video: Text Function Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. We’re currently looking at the use of functions in Excel 2013 and we’re looking at the use of functions to improve the generation of invoices for this plumbing company. Now in the previous section, we used the VLOOKUP function to use what was effectively a customer database on the Customers Sheet here. So let’s just take another look at the Customers Sheet and what I’m going to do now is to make a change to this database. You’ll very often be in the position that you need to make changes, and the change that I’m going to make here is, first of all, I’m going to change the terms column. Currently the terms say things like 7 days, 30 days, 30 days, 60 days. I’m going to change the way that that column works by just specifying only the number of days and not say 7 days, 30 days, 30 days, and so on. So for instance, in that one I’m going to change that. I’m just going to delete the word Days. I’ll delete the rest of those and then rejoin you. Now, first of all, why have I done that? Well, the reason I’ve done that is that I want to be able to calculate when an invoice is due. And the way I’m going to calculate it is by adding the number of days in the terms of business for the individual company that I’m dealing with to the date that the invoice was generated. So for instance to find when an invoice to Frequent Showers is due, I would add 7 days to the invoice date. Now, of course, that will have a consequential problem. If I go back to the invoice itself where it says Terms, it will now just say 7 instead of 7 days. And what I’m going to do now is show you the use of what are called Text Functions to put text or extract text or change text in any field. Now I should point out here as I have done from time to time that there a few ways of doing this and I’m only showing you one of the available ways of doing it. But if you select the cell, in this case the one that should say 7 days and just says 7, we’ve still got the formula in there that we put in before with the VLOOKUP function. What I really want to do is to sort of attach the word Days to the end of that in some way. Now one of the ways of doing it is to use one of the text functions. And within the Function Library on the Formulas tab, text functions have their own little category. There are many of them. And I’m going to use the one that’s called Concatenate and concatenate joins several text strings into one text string. Now all I need to do to use concatenate is to put brackets after it and then to put the text strings I want joined together in the


Learn Excel 2013 brackets separated by commas. Now this is where sometimes people start getting a bit confused because you see an awful lot of brackets appearing. So I’m going to take this step by step. First of all, equals in the formula bar says this is a formula. And the main part of the formula now is concatenate. Now note that I could have used that from the drop down and it would’ve put in if you like the bones of the function for me and let me put in the rest of it myself. But I’m typing it in directly as concatenate, then I’m opening brackets, and it will tell me now that let’s have the first bit of text. Now my first bit of text is what that VLOOKUP does because what that VLOOKUP does is to give me the number of days. So if I just had that, I’d get 7 or 30 or 60. But I don’t just want that. I want another piece of text as well. Now the other piece of text is always the same and it’s almost this. If you want to specifically put a piece of text in put double quotes and then put the word, in this case Days because I want it to say 7 days or 15 days or 30 days. One slight problem there though is I also want a space before the word Days. So it will 7, space, Days or 30, space, Days, etc. Now when I’ve put in all the strings that I want I put in, close the round bracket, and I will enter that as my formula. And now look what happens, it again says 7 days. And if I change, let’s try a different account, 2973, tick that. It says 30 days. So that’s great. So I mentioned just now that the idea of introducing the number of days rather than the whole phrase was to enable me to put a due date on to an invoice and that’s what I’m going to do in the next section. I’ll see you then.


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Video: Date and Time Functions Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. We’re looking at improving the generation of invoices for this plumbing supplies company and in the previous section we looked at Text Functions to concatenate the number of days in the terms of business for each customer with the literal string Days. And with that, we’ve managed to put in here the terms of business for each customer. Now one of the reasons for switching the way we did it originally was that we could then calculate the due date for an invoice. Now in order to do the calculation of the due date, we’re going to look in this section at some Date and Time Functions. Now the first thing I want to look at is the order date here. The order date says December 1, 2012 and it’s actually typed in as a literal date. What I’d like to do instead is to put in there the current date, the date today. Now I’m on the Formulas tab on the Ribbon and there are the Date and Time Functions. If I click on the drop down, again there’s a long list of them. Two of them are of particular interest here. One of them is Now and one of them is Today. Now Today returns the current date formatted as a date, whereas Now returns the current date and time. Now I don’t need the time for an order date so I’m going to go for today. Click on Today and that cell now contains equals today with brackets. Now in the case of the Today Function, there are no Arguments and this particular message here just reinforces the fact this function takes no arguments. Click on OK and it will return today’s date which is December 11, 2012, so that’s fine. Of course, you might worry, well if I look at this tomorrow will it say December the 12 th? But if I’m printing this and sending it to a client when it’s going to carry on saying December the 11th if I print it today. Now what I’m going to do is to basically put a due date on the invoice above the terms. Now I’m going to cheat a little bit here because I’m going to copy the cell that says Order Date and the cell that’s got today’s date in it. So I’ve selected those two, keyboard shortcut Control-C to copy them, down here, paste them, and I’m going to click on the cell that says Order Date and change that to Due Date. And now the question is what do I need to do to this date in order to give a correct due date? Now the answer to that question is surprisingly straightforward. And you may remember me mentioning much earlier on in the course that dates are stored as the number of days since January 1, 1900. So when you’re looking at a date like December 11,


Learn Excel 2013 2012, Excel actually just has a big number in there. It doesn’t actually store it as a date, it just has the number of days since January 1, 1900. So if you wanted to find a date that was in this case 30 days later than that, all you’ve got to do is to add the number 30 to the date in there. So for this due date which currently says equals today, I can just say equals today plus. Now all I need to do is to add in the number of days in the terms of business for this customer. And this is, of course, my VLOOKUP function. So let me come out of the one I’m editing there, go back into this one here, the 30 days. That was the VLOOKUP part and what I can do here to save me typing that all in again is in the formula bar, click to the left of VLOOKUP, just copy that as a piece of text, make sure you get the last bracket, and then Control-C to copy it. We’ve not made a change to that so we can just cancel that. Go back in here. So this is now the due date formula: equals today plus and now I can paste the VLOOKUP function that I’ve just copied from the cell below. Tick now, 30 days after December 11, 2012 is January 10, 2013. That looks good to me, but I always test these things when I’ve done them. So that’s client 2973. Let’s try that with client 2971, tick that, 7 days. That’ll be payable on December the 18th. And let’s try it with 2974. So I change the account there, 2974. That’s 60 day terms. That’ll be February 9, 2013. So everything’s fine in terms of calculating these dates. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Video: Logical Functions Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. We’ve been looking at a case study, the production of an invoice for a plumbing supplies company as a way of looking at the functions that are available in Excel 2013 in a bit more detail. In this section, we’re going to look at what are called Logical Functions. This is functions which will cause us to do one thing in one set of circumstances and different things in different circumstances. Now in order to look at Logical Functions or an example of the Logical Function, we’re going to look at the table that we placed in the invoice. This was earlier on in the course and we’ve currently got half a dozen items in that table, which are part of this order. Now the items that we’ve got there we’re actually going to delete. So I want to clear all of these cells. I’m just going to select them and the easiest way to clear them is just to click on the Delete key. Now we are instead going to populate the order with items from our latest catalogue. Now the latest catalogue is the second worksheet in this workbook. So if you click on Catalogue, you can see we have product codes, descriptions for each of the products, a quantity or size for each, a list price, and then certain clients can get a discount and the percentage discount is marked here in Column E, and then for customers that get the discount the net price to them is in Column F. Now the feature that we’re going to put into this part of the invoice is that some customers will pay the list price without the discount and some will pay the net price. Now if I click back on to the Customers Worksheet this column, E, in the Customer Worksheet says whether a customer gets the discount or not. So customers 2971 and 2973, Frequent Showers and West Beach Bathrooms get the discount. They have Yes. The other two don’t get the discount. There isn’t any particular reason why two of them do and two of them don’t other than to demonstrate what we’re doing in this section. So let’s go back to the Catalogue and look again. We’ve got a product code, description, and we’ve got prices. Now let’s go back to the invoice and see how we’re going to put all this together. Now there’s one thing about this table that I’m not entirely happy about and that is that I really ought to have a unit cost there. I’ve got a cost figure. I’ve got an order quantity. I really would like to see a unit cost. So what I’m going to do is to put the selection here in the order quantity column in the table, go to the Insert on the Home tab, and select Insert Table Columns


Learn Excel 2013 to the left. And on that column the field that I’m going to select, what I’m going to call it is Unit Cost. So when I come to calculate the cost for a particular item in the order it will be order quantity multiplied by unit cost. Now I should point out that when it comes to adjusting the widths of these columns, they are interconnected with the widths of the columns in the sheet overall. So there’s a certain amount of adjustment needed here to balance up the widths of these columns. But that’s not really the primary purpose of what we’re doing in this section. So if you want to tidy that up, you should know how to do that now. I’ll leave that to you. I’m just going to put that extra column in. So let’s just take another quick look at the Catalogue. The Catalogue, first column is the product code, second column is the description, third column is the quantity size that goes with the description. So let’s go back here to the invoice. Let’s look. Product code will go in there. That’s what we select. And then we want to AutoFill in what the description is. Now we know that in order to do that we need a Lookup Function, we need a VLOOKUP. So if we click on VLOOKUP, it comes up with that helpful little dialog. The Lookup Value for that row will be B21. The Table array to look at it in is on the Catalogue Sheet, so let’s go to the Catalogue Sheet, and it’s going to be from A to how far down does that go? It’s not a very long Catalogue actually. In reality I’d probably have thousands of rows here, but this only goes as far as that. So that’s the Catalogue. And which Column has the description in it? That was Column 2 in the Catalogue. Click on OK and we get that. Now note at the moment we get N/A’s in there and the N/A’s in there because we don’t currently have anything in the product number. And when Excel looks at the product number, there isn’t one there and therefore it can’t find anything in the table. Now I’ll come back to that point in just a moment but let’s put a real product number in the first row. So back to the Catalogue; let’s put that one in, MAP15001. M-A-P-1-5-0-0-1. Now if I press the Tab key or the Enter key or just click in the next cell watch what happens. We now find the description for that item. Now before we go any farther let’s just look at this VLOOKUP again. Don’t forget we’ve got to be careful with the VLOOKUP that we put in absolute cell references in the right places. So for instance when it comes to looking in the table in the Catalogue Sheet, we need to make sure that these are absolute references. Now we don’t really have time to go through the next point in this © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 course, but if we set that up as a table, we’d make life a little bit easier for ourselves. But for the moment, all I’ve done is put the dollars in there to make sure that as I use variations on this VLOOKUP at various places in this table, I always look at the Cells A2 to F50 on the Catalogue Sheet to look up the Catalogue. Now the other thing we have to be careful of is that the B21 that’s referenced here for the product code will not be B21 on every row in this table because in the next row, it would be B22, then B23, and B24. So the first part B will not vary, 21 will. Now what we do in that situation to stop Excel from changing this in a way that makes the Formula wrong is to put a dollar just in front of the B, not in front of the 21. So what that says is you’ll always look in Column B but the number part which is 21 on the first row will change in subsequent rows but the B won’t. So, if I say there Yes. I know have a Lookup Function that should work consistently elsewhere in this table. Now let’s deal with these rows with the N/A’s in them. Generally speaking in this table, I’m not going to have loads of blank rows. I’m only going to have the rows that I need, and therefore the problem whereby I get a formula error when there is no product code, it will not occur. Now I could protect myself from that in a different way by putting a check in and saying well if the product codes blank don’t try to put anything in the description. But that would take a little bit more time to explain so all I’m going to do is just select those few cells there, on the Home tab, Delete, say Delete Table Rows, and it will delete the table rows that are not in use at the moment. Now having worked out how to fill in the description using that VLOOKUP and the VLOOKUP looks at Column 2 on the Catalogue Sheet, let’s copy that and let’s paste it into the unit type column. Now that’s also looking at Column 2 and we know that the units are actually in Column 3. So let’s change that to 3 and now that one gives us the correct units for MAP15001, Catalogue. MAP15001. It’s a 15 kilo, 10 liter pack. Now in that way, you could go through and complete the rest of this. Now, I’m going to do it, first of all, based on the standard list price of each item. So let’s go and look at Catalogue, the list price is Column 4. So if I go back here, click in that gormula, copy it, paste it into there, and then go to that formula and change it to 4, tick that. I find the unit price is 13.8. I can, of course, format that as a Currency if I want to. Supposing I now type in my order quantity of 5 say, the cost column, the last column, should contain what? It should contain quantity which is F21 times price which is E21, tick it, and it comes to $69.00. And if I select that and that, go into © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Format, Format Cells, Currency, two decimal places, dollar character, OK, there we are. And I can also, of course, format my total as Currency as well; Currency two decimal places. Total cost of my order $69.00. So let’s now select within that first row of the order and then on the Home tab click on Insert table row below. So I put in a blank line now and I’m now going to basically type in another Catalogue product code. So let’s look at a Catalogue product code. What about MAP20031? MAP20031, Tab, and everything else gets filled in except the quantity, of course, which is my choice in the order. Let’s suppose I want four of those. Press Tab and there you are. You can see my invoice creation working really well. So that just leaves us with the question of choosing whether the customer pays the list price or the discounted price. And in order to do this we need to build this up in a couple of steps. First of all, don’t forget the customer’s account number is in this Field here which is C17 as we saw before. And also on the Customers Table here whether they’re discounted or not is in Column 5 of that table. Now the way we do this is as follows. If you look at the unit cost cell there, it says equals VLOOKUP and it basically says look up the product code, B21 in this case, in the Catalogue, and there’s the Catalogue, and use Column 4. Now, back to the Catalogue. If I’d wanted to use the discounted price, I would’ve used Column 6. So in that formula instead of a 4, I would’ve put a 6. So, if the customer doesn’t get a discount, that column contains a 4 and if the customer does get a discount the column contains a 6. Now the way we structure this in Excel 2013 is in the Formulas tab in the Logical Group, again there’s a few functions. The one we’re going to use is the If Function. Now before I use the If Function, I’m just going to copy this VLOOKUP statement here to the Clipboard with a ControlC. I’m actually then going to delete it for the moment and I’m going to choose a Logical If statement. Now the structure of the Logical If statement is that there is a test and then there’s something we do if the test is true and something we do if the test is false. The test we’re going to apply is does this customer get a discount? If the answer if True, then what we’re going to put in here is, let me just paste that now. If they get a discount what we’re going to put in here is that VLOOKUP statement. So we’re going to put in the one with Column 6 at the end. If the test is False, we’re going to put in the 4 statement. So what we need to know now is what is the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 test? Well, to perform the test what we have to do is to look up C17, that’s the account number on the Customers Sheet and remember the database on the Customers Sheet goes from A2 to G5, and we need to check in Column 5, that’s Column A number 5, whether it says Yes. So let me just type that in here. Test VLOOKUP. What are we looking up? We’re looking up dollar-C, dollar-17. That’s, of course, on the Invoice Sheet. Where are we looking it up? We’re looking it up on Customers. Dollar-A, dollar-2, colon, dollar-G, dollar-5. And which column are we looking in? We’re looking in Column 5. Close brackets and the test is, now to do the test we put an equals sign and then we say if what we see there is the word Yes. So if that Lookup equals Yes, bear in mind in some cases is Yes and in some cases it isn’t. If it’s Yes, use the Column 6 price from the Catalogue. If it’s No, use the Column 4 price from the Catalogue. Let’s click on OK and let’s see how that looks. Now one thing to bear in mind is that at the moment, the account number 2974, the account number will determine the unit cost here. So it currently says 13.80. Let’s try a different account number. Let’s go to account number 2973, tick that, watch the unit cost on the first row of the table. And there you see this customer gets the lower unit cost, 11.04 instead of the 13.80 we had before. That means 2973 must the discount, 2974 doesn’t. Let’s just check on the Customers Sheet; 2973 Yes, 2973 gets discount, 2974 doesn’t. So that pretty much works. And as you can see, it’s a pretty horrible looking formula now because for one thing it’s a very long formula. But it looks more complicated than it is actually because with an If statement, you have If, then you have brackets; you have three things, what’s the condition, what to do if it’s True, what to do if it isn’t True. Doing it the way we did with the dialog just now I think is a very convenient way of doing it. You may get to the point that you can just type these things in after you’ve done them for awhile, but they do tend to get a bit complicated. But don’t forget that once you’ve got that in place, you’re going to be using it over and over again not only within this specific single order here but also you can use exactly the same principle on every invoice that’s generated using this particular workbook and worksheet. So although it takes a little bit of time to get it setup and tested just think how much time it would save a company in the long run. So that just leaves me with a little exercise for you to finish off with. This is Example 15. What I’d like you to do is to just add a couple more rows to the order, just use a couple of the other existing items in the Catalogue, choose your own order quantities, make sure that you understand © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 how the If statement is setup, make sure that the workings of the checking the discount are okay and so on. And then I’d like you to extend the Customer Table to include the phone number and make that cell there, D9, work with phone number. You can make up your own phone numbers, of course. My answer to that question will be Example 16. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 23 – Analyzing Data Video: Financial Analysis Case Study – Part 1 Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look at Financial Functions in Excel 2013 and we’re going to do this via a case study. The case study we’re going to use involves looking at the options for a mortgage. And in the first section, we’re going to look at the financial functions themselves and how some of those are involved in costing a mortgage. And then subsequently we’re going to look at developing the case study and also using some What-If Analysis. Now the first thing I’m going to do is to setup the values that are going to be used in the calculation of mortgage payments. The first of them is going to be the amount of the loan, which I am going to at the moment treat as the purchase price of a house. So I’m going to enter a purchase price. The next thing I’m going to need to enter is the interest rate. Now clearly interest rates can vary, although when somebody gets a mortgage, they sometimes get a fixed interest rate, sometimes a variable interest rate. I’m going to treat this as a fixed interest rate for the moment. The next thing to enter is the period of the loan, the duration of the loan. Now I’m going to put the duration in, in years and then how many payments per year are we going to make. Now given those four things, I’ll put the numbers in, in just a moment, what we need to do is to work out the amount of each of those payments. And one of Excel’s Financial Functions does that job for us. So first of all, let’s put in a price, an amount of a loan. Let’s say we’re going to have a loan of $300,000. Now let’s put in an interest rate. Let’s say the interest rate is going to be 4%. The duration in years, let’s go for a duration of 30 years, and let’s say we’re going to go for monthly payments. Now what I’m going to do is to just tidy this up a bit before I do the calculation of the monthly amount. So I’m going to select that row with the headings in it, bold, center aligned. And then with each of these, I’m going to go in and format the cell accordingly. So 300,000, Format © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Cells, that’s going to be Currency, two decimal places although with this amount I actually don’t need any decimal places. That’s fine. The interest rate I will treat as a percentage. Watch what happens if I just click four and then say Format Cells and change it to Percentage. It actually becomes 400 because what it does when I change that is it says four units is 400%. So what I really want to do here, I can either go back and make that 0.04 to start with or I can change this to just say 4%. It’s a common thing that happens when you’re working with percentages. If you forget what happens when you convert a number to a percentage. But you can just go in and edit it like that. The duration in years, 30 is fine; payments for year 12 is also fine. So let’s work out what that payment is. The function that you need here is one that you’ll probably use quite a bit if you use Financial Functions extensively and it’s the PMT Function; the PMT for Payment. Go to the Formulas Tab on the Ribbon and there is a category in the Function Library of Financial. Click on Financial. There are a lot of Financial Functions. If you scroll down, click on PMT, and this comes up with a Function Arguments dialog. Now there are up to five things to enter here and as you click in each one, there’s a little explanation of what to enter in each case. This is really a common theme amongst the functions and it can be particularly useful with Financial Functions where Excel tends to use the standard abbreviations for financial entities. But to the layman, some of those abbreviations may not really mean very much. So having the explanation as well is really useful. So let’s look at what the arguments are for the PMT Function starting at the top. And the one at the top is rate and the explanation of that is, is the interest rate per period for the loan. For example, use 6% divided by 4 for quarterly payments at 6%. Now in our case, our interest rate is 4% in a year. Therefore in a period, it will be 4% divided by 12. Now we’re not going to put in there 4% divided by 12 because that would fix this. It’s going to make it more difficult for us to make any changes to either the interest rate or the payment method that we’re going to use. So what we’ve put in here is C3 divided by E3. So that will be 4% divided by 12 and again it’s a common thing with these Function Arguments dialogs. Usually depending on the row or the particular case that you’re dealing with Excel will do the calculation for you. So this is saying that in one month, bear in mind we’re doing 12 payments a year, in one calendar month we’re going to be paying 0.003333333% interest. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So let’s look at the second amount, Nper is the total number of payments for the loan. Now we’re going for 30 years in this case, 12 payments per year. So the total number of payments will be D3 times E3, 360 payments. The next field is Pv. Pv is the Present Value, the total amount that a series of future payments is worth now. And this basically means what is the amount of the loan, which is going to be of course B3. Now very important one here, Fv; Fv is the Future Value or a cash balance you want to attain after the last payment is made. Zero if admitted. There are some types of loan where you’re not actually aiming to pay off the full amount; you’re just aiming to reduce it. In this case, we’re going to pay off the full amount. But if we just wanted to reduce it to a closing balance, we could put the closing balance in here. If we admit to put a figure in here then it’s assumed that the closing balance is going to be zero. And the final value to put in here is the type of payment. Now this is a Logical Value. You either put in a one or a zero. If you put in a one, then you’re assuming that payments will be made at the beginning of each payment period. If you put a zero or omitted value here, then it’s assumed that payments will be made at the end of each period. Now we’re going to make payments at the end of what are currently monthly periods here. So we can omit that or put a zero. So having completed everything, we need to in the Function Arguments dialog, click on OK and see what happens. And what we come up with is a red figure, so that’s a negative amount. That means that it’s a payment, a debit from an account rather than a credit to an account, of $1,432.25 per month on this loan. So that looks really great. It gives us a very simple way of calculating the payment amount. Now let’s suppose we looked at that and though, okay well I wonder if I could pay it off a little more quickly than that. Could I afford a little more than that per month? What if I paid it off over a shorter period? Now one of the advantages of what you’ve learned already and one of the advantages of how Functions and Formulae work in Excel 2013 is that it’s pretty easy to experiment with this. I could just put a different amount of years in there. I could put in more or less payments per year. Let’s suppose to begin with that I just select those cells and then drag


Learn Excel 2013 down just say a few rows like that, and then I do a fill down. So on the Home tab, down, Control-D is the keyboard shortcut you should remember; so Control-D. And now let me try some different numbers of year. So I’ve got 30 there. What would the payment with say 40 years? I might not be able to get a loan for 40 years, but what effect would 40 years have? So 10 more years. What difference would that make to my monthly payments? Well it would knock them down by about $180.00 per month. What about 25 years? They’re up to 1,583; 20 years, 15 years, 10 years, 5 years. And you can compare all of the payment amounts and say, well, which of those could I afford? Maybe you say I could actually get it down to 20 years instead of 30 by paying 1,817.94 per month. So that’s less than $400 extra per month, I could reduce the loan term by 10 years. So that shows you how easy it is to experiment with these figures once you’re using the PMT Function. Now one the great strengths of being able to do this sort of thing in Excel 2013 is that there are many other Financial Functions that can help with an analysis like this one. So if I were looking at the options in terms of duration, I may ask a number of questions about those options. For instance, one of the questions might be, well with each of these options what would I actually finish up paying in total? And there are a few functions that can help with this. What we’re going to do just as an example is to look at a function that tells us the total amount paid over the period of the loan. And that’s basically made up of two things. It’s made up of the repayment of the capital, the purchase price of the house in this case plus the interest. So what I’m going to do here is to show you how to put in the total interest paid. So I’m going to introduce a new column there. It’s the Total Interest Column. I could obviously then add the total interest to the capital repaid to find the total amount of money I would’ve paid altogether, maybe put that in Column H. But let’s start here with the total interest. There is a function, CUMIPMT, which is Cumulative Interest Payment. Quite easy to insert that. So again Financial, CUMIPMT, there it is. We’re going to fill in the Arguments for this. One thing to be careful of here, sometimes when you get the Function Arguments dialog, you see a little scroll bar over the right. That means there may be more arguments than you can see when you open it. So in this case, don’t miss that last argument whatever you do. There are a couple of others like that as well. So first of all, we put in the rate per period which of course in our case is C3, that’s the annual rate divided by payments per year which is E3. Next is Nper, the total number of payment periods


Learn Excel 2013 which is D3 multiplied by E3. Pv next, the Present Value, that’s the amount of the loan, which is B3, the start period. Now we can find the total interest paid between any two periods. We’re here going to look at the total. So we’re going from period one to the last period. So we put one in the start period and the end period will also be D3 multiplied by E3 because it’s the total number of payment periods. Don’t forget Excel’s just calculating these as we go, 360 payments, 30 years, 12 per year. That’s 360, that’s fine. And then finally the type; we discussed the type just now. One if you’re paying at the beginning of a period, zero at the end. Unfortunately there’s a little inconsistency here in that in this dialog for this function, it doesn’t default to zero. So we actually have to put a zero in. So when we’ve done that click on OK and what we find is that if we use the 30 year duration and monthly payments the total amount of interest paid would be $215,608, which means add it to the 300,000 which, of course, we could do here. You’d pay just over $515,000 to pay off a $300,000 loan. So let me just format that as Currency and in this case, I’m going to use red for the payments, two decimal places. And then finally with this I’m now going to fill that down to compare the total interest paid with all of those other durations. So fill down, that’s Control-D and there you can see. For instance, in the case of the 5 year term, obviously the monthly payments are very high, over $5,500 dollars per month. But the total amount of interest paid is relatively small at $31,000. The figures in the middle are probably more like the ones where I’d want to look at those and say, well which one do I think gives me the best deal? So I think even from that relatively straightforward example, you can see the power of Financial Functions within Excel. But there’s an issue with this and that is if I were being very, very realistic about a mortgage loan like this one I would then say, okay that’s fine if interest rates are 4%. But what happens if interest rates go up during the period of the loan? If I’m not on a fixed interest rate, how would increasing interest rates affect my payments? Would the loan still be affordable? And again I might say, well what if interest rates come down? Maybe I could pay this off more quickly. So it’s quite often the case that the particular financial issue you’re dealing with is a little bit more complicated than just changing one variable, in this case the duration.


Learn Excel 2013 So we’re going to look at slightly more sophisticated version of this analysis in the next section. Please join me for that.


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Video: Financial Analysis Case Study – Part 2 Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to continue our review of the use of the Financial Functions in Excel 2013 and we’re going to extend the case study that we looked at in the preceding section. Now in the preceding section, we produced this worksheet which we can use to compare payments on a loan over various durations at a fixed interest rate.

Now we’re now going to make this a little bit more

sophisticated and we’re going to say that we want to do the same sort of analysis, but we want to do it on the basis of two input variables, two things that can vary, the duration of the loan say between 5 and 40 years and variation in the interest rate as well. Say we’ll make a minimum interest rate of 1% and a maximum of say 6%. So what we need to do is to turn this solution into a two-dimensional solution and the way that we do this in Excel 2013 is to setup what’s called a Data Table. Now the first thing I’m going to do is pretty much obliterate all of the data that we’ve got so far. We’re not going to need any of that. And what we’re going to do instead is I’m going to just put in three of these cells the basic values that we’re starting with. So, the purchase price of the house. We’ll stick with the house purchase and there we are. I’ve set all of that up fine. Hopefully, you wouldn’t have any trouble setting that up yourself including formatting each of these cells in the correct way. So I’ve got a Currency Cell there with no decimal places, a Percentage Cell, and a Cell that’s defined as having a number content with no decimal places. Now the next thing I’m going to do is to type in this cell here the formula to calculate the interest payments. Now you should be able to do that as well by now, but let’s just go through it again. I don’t have to use the dialog by the way. I can actually start typing and let Excel help me as I go. So I type equals PMT, open brackets. Now can you remember what these things are? What’s the rate? Now that’s the rate per period. So that’s the annual interest rate which is currently C3 divided by 12. I’m going to assume monthly payments. I don’t have to, but I’m going to assume monthly payments. Then it’s a comma, then it’s Nper, that’s the number of periods which is C4 times 12. Then it’s another comma. Then it’s Pv which is effectively in this case the purchase price which is C2. Now the other two, you notice how the arguments have brackets around them. Notice the sort of square brackets. That tells you that those arguments are optional. You


Learn Excel 2013 can leave those out. The ones that don’t have square brackets, you have to put in, but the ones with square brackets are optional. We know that they’re optional. In the final value, we want a zero and the type, it’s actually a type zero as we saw before, but it will default to being that. So close the round bracket, tick, and we have the payment. Now the payment is the same payment that we had before, of course. Now what I’m going to put underneath where the formula is, is the list of percentage interest rates that I want to be able to see the monthly payments for. So I’ve selected a whole load of cells there. I’m going to format that cells as percentages. So Format Cells will make them all percent and then I’m going to go down going 1, 1.5, so on. So I said I’m going from 1% to 6%. And then on this row next to where the formula is I’m going to put in the durations in years. Now the durations in years are just numbers. So I’m just going to select some cells along there. I’m going to format those just as numbers. I don’t need decimal places. So click on OK and then I’m going to enter 5, 10. So I’ve got up to 40 years and now what I’m going to do is to create this data table that I mentioned earlier on. And the idea is that you select the number of rows that covers the whole range plus the formula which you really need to be in this corner with one set of variables below it. So in this case the range of interest rate percentage is below it. And the other variable, the second variable in this two variable table to the right of the formula. So this is going from 5 year duration to 40 years duration. And what we do is make the minimum rectangular selection that includes all of that. So basically the selection is that. Now having made that selection, you then on the Data tab on the Ribbon go to the Data Tools Group and one of the options there is What-If Analysis. Click on the drop down and one of the options is Data Table. Now with this little dialog what we need to do is to tell Excel which of the cells that’s used in the formula corresponds to the values in this row and which of the cells that’s used in the formula corresponds to the values in this column. Now the row, where we’ve got this row of values here, they’re the durations in years. And that corresponds to the Cell C4 which is the duration here that we originally used in the formula. So the row input cell is dollar-C, dollar-4. The cell we’ve used in the formula corresponding to this column here, the annual interest rate column is C3. So in here we put dollar-C, dollar-3. And now Excel can relate the values in that row, the values in


Learn Excel 2013 that column to the values that have been used in the formula. So we click on OK and it comes up with a number of values. Now, all we now to do let’s just changes these back to a Currency type. So select all of those, Currency with two decimal places, click on OK, now we’ve got a more realistic representation of what the monthly payments are. And this Data Table gives you a very straightforward way of reading off what the payments would be under a combination of durations and interest rates. Obviously, you’re going to be in a better position if you have a fixed interest rate over the period of a loan because you can pretty much guarantee what the payments are going to be. But even if you don’t have a fixed interest rate, it does show you how the payments will vary as the interest rate fluctuates over the term of the loan. Now as you can see from this, the use of two variables makes this a much more powerful tool and you may now think, well what about three variables? Could I go into a third dimension? Now in terms of representation in a straightforward way in a worksheet, I’m afraid you can’t. You can actually work multi-dimensionally in Excel but not quite in this way. But you can deal with a more complex situation with more variables by using some of the other facilities in Excel. Now those facilities are outside the scope of this course, but if you are interested in using these types of technique, you really need to look at What-If Analysis generally in Help and then look at things like scenarios and the scenario manager. And just to give you a very brief idea of how you might use the scenario manager in a third dimension, you could run this analysis say with a purchase price of $300,000, then run it again with a purchase price of $250,000. So effectively imagine building up sheets with those different purchase prices and what the scenario manager does is make it easy for you to manage that type of situation where you’re managing a third variable or even more than three variables. So I hope you found that introduction to data analysis and the use of Financial Functions in Excel useful. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Video: Quick Analysis Tool Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at one of the brand new features of Excel, which was introduced in Excel 2013 which is the Quick Analysis Tool. Now in fact, you may well have seen the Quick Analysis Tool already on this course and maybe wondered what it was. I haven’t pointed it out to you so far because for it to make some sense we needed to cover quite a lot of other material first. But if I select some of the cells on this worksheet, this is the worksheet we looked at earlier with the scores for a class on their quizzes, essays, midterm tests, and so on. If I select some of the cells, say Columns A to D, the entries in A to D, and then having made that selection, so I’ve got the selection rectangle around it, just release the mouse. This little icon down here in the bottom right, if I hover over that this gives access to the Quick Analysis Tool. And if you read the screen tip, Use the Quick Analysis Tool to quickly and easily analyze your data with some of Excel’s most useful tools such as charts, color coding, and formulas. Now the idea of this is that if you want to do a quick analysis of one of the most popular types on a selection of data and you don’t necessarily want to find the right command on the right tab on the Ribbon or maybe go through some kind of preparatory steps, you can do a quick analysis just by selecting from what is in effect a special kind of mini toolbar. So if I click on this tool now you can see this sort of mini toolbar. It’s divided into a number of tabs. So we have a Formatting tab, Charts tab, Totals tab, Tables tab, and Sparklines. And within each of those there’s a set of commands. So within Formatting, we have Conditional Formatting Commands for example. Within Charts, we can draw different types of chart. Totals, we can do different totals on the selected columns and so on. So let’s have a look at a couple of examples of those. Let’s start by looking at the Totals tab and let’s choose the average. So click on average and look what happens. For each of the assessments that’s included in those three Columns, B, C, and D, we have an average score for the whole class. Now if I click on one of these average scores such as B21 note that it’s just put in a regular formula. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that. And it has in fact included an average heading along the side here. But the fact that it’s used an Average Formula means I can go in and format this and so on as necessary. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So you’re not only talking about the quick analysis of being a way of doing a quick analysis, but it can be a quick way of getting you started on something where you can add a lot more detail yourself later on. So for instance having put that total in there, I could format those cells, maybe restrict the numbers to two decimal places, click on OK, and so on. So quick analysis yes, but also getting you quickly started on a more detailed analysis as well. Let’s take a look at one of the other options. Let’s try Charts. Now, of course, we have four or five suitable charts or charts that Excel considers to be suitable. We can also link through to more charts and use one of a different type. But with the Quick Analysis Tool, if you hover over one of the proposed options for a chart, you actually get a preview of it as well. So for instance there, you’ve got a stacked column, there you’ve got a scatter. I don’t really think the scatter works in this occasion. You have a clustered column, a stacked bar, a clustered bar, and so on. So if I say went for stacked bar as an option, the charts created, but then as before I can just proceed with it as normal as a regular chart. So I can resize it. The Chart Tools appear. So I have the additional Design and Format tabs and I can go in and make all the same changes, put on a legend, change the title, change the size of the font. All of the formatting and design changes that I could regularly make with a chart I can do following on from the use of the Quick Analysis Tool. Now let me just insert one column in here to demonstrate something else. Okay, now I’m going to make the same selection again and I’m going to talk about one or two of the things you can do with the Quick Analysis Tool on topics that we haven’t covered in this course so far but which you may find interesting or useful and which you may have heard about. And I’ll just quickly cover one or two of those things now. With that same selection one of the other categories on the Quick Analysis Tool was Sparklines. And if you take a situation like this where you’ve got a number of categories, in this case the categories are pupils at a school, then you can actually do a very quick chart in situ within the table of results in this case to show the progress of each of the students. Now these are called Sparklines and if I choose a Line Sparkline, choosing that will draw it in the column that I opened up. So for each of these pupils, you can show their progress over the course of the period of time, the term, semester, 82, 90, 87, going up, going down. Now with three quizzes that’s maybe not the best representation, but, of course, you could choose the whole table and chose one of the student’s progression over a period of time. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Now something else you may have heard of in relation to Excel are pivot tables. And if I click on the Tables tab here, you have Pivot Table options. If I hover over those, you’ll see that with each of those I get a different combination of information: row labels, some of quiz two, and so on. And with these combinations you can make what’s called a pivot table and the associated pivot chart. And although pivot tables and pivot charts wouldn’t particularly help with the sort of data we’ve got here, where you’ve got more complex data pivot tables and pivot charts are a really great help. Just to give you a very specific example, let’s suppose you make machine parts and you sell them around the world. When you look to analyze your sales and maybe work out what your marketing and selling strategy is for the future, you might look at things like which countries you sell in, what the price of the parts are, which particular markets in those countries you sell to. You may have a whole different array of ways of looking at the figures; you’ve got on your sales around the world. Now pivot tables with pivot charts give you a great way of looking at a complex analysis where many factors are involved, possibly factors that interrelate but sometimes factors which are independent as well. Now we haven’t covered pivot tables and pivot charts on this course, but many people consider the use of pivot tables and pivot charts to be one of the strongest ways of taking advantage of Microsoft Excel. So there we are. Even within the types of data and analysis that we’re used to, there are some additional options here. So for instance on totals there is the Running Total; just click on Running Total and as you can see with these columns it’s giving a Running Total Column by column as it builds up. So Quick Analysis Tool is really something where there’s plenty for you to experiment with and sometimes it might even give you new ideas on how you can analyze data you’ve got in a worksheet. That’s it on the Quick Analysis Tool. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 24 – Shapes and Pictures Video: Adding and Formatting Shapes, Picture, Clip Art, WordArt and SmartArt Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a very quick look at using Shapes and Pictures in Excel 2013. It may not be something that immediately leaps to mind for you to think that you’re going to want to put illustrations into a workbook. But in fact it can be useful for many different reasons to be able to add shapes, pictures, graphics, and so on. And the facilities in Excel 2013 for doing this are very good. So what I’m going to do in this section because we have limited time is to show you the basic tools and techniques quite quickly and I’m going to start just by using a new empty workbook. So, first of all, on the Insert tab there is an Illustrations button here and if you look underneath that there’s a little drop down arrow, Illustrations and we have five options. We have Pictures, Online Pictures, Shapes, SmartArt, and Screenshot. Let’s start with Pictures. If I click on Pictures and look at the screen tip, From File; insert pictures from your computer or from other computers that you’re connected to. Now if I click on that what I will get is the facility to browse to pictures on this device or on my network, on my home group, or however I’m setup. And then it’s a straightforward case of looking through what’s available, maybe deciding I’d like to include that particular image, click on Insert, and that image is now in my workbook. Once it’s in the workbook, I get a Format tab within Picture Tools and I can do quite a bit of processing on this image in situ within my worksheet/workbook. So for instance, if I click on the picture, I can see on the right in size that there’s a pair of boxes that tell me how big it is. I could change the size for example. So if I click on the little Size and Properties dialog launcher there, Format Picture. I have options here. I’ll lock the Aspect Ratio and I’ll make it smaller. I’m going to make it, ooo, there we are 20% of what it originally was. And having resized the picture like that, still with it selected I then can do things like put a Picture Border on, Picture Effects and Layout, Picture Styles Gallery here will let me choose ways of presenting the picture, perhaps with a frame and so on. So you have a pretty good set of formatting tools for pictures that you might choose to insert into your workbooks. So that’s one of the options for shapes and pictures within a workbook. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 Now let’s look at one of the other options, Insert, Illustrations. Let’s look at Online Pictures. Now with Online Pictures you have a choice.

There is access to the Office.com clip art

selection. And as it says there Royalty free photos and illustrations. I should point out there are licensing conditions with these and that you need to have Microsoft Software, a valid Microsoft Software license to use them and, of course, to absolutely accurate about the copyright issues and so on you need to read the full license agreement. And then we have Bing Image Search where you can search the web for images that might satisfy a particular requirement you have. And if you’ve got your SkyDrive setup and I have got my own SkyDrive setup, I’m going to show you that in a couple of sections time, then you can look for images in your own SkyDrive. So for instance, let’s suppose I wanted to look for something by way of clip art. Let’s suppose I want to look for something related to a bath in clip art. I can type in Bath, hit the Enter key, it does a search, and it comes up with a load of clip art related to bath time. If I choose one of those images, let’s say that one, click on Insert, then that is now in my workbook and note I’ve got the same Picture Tools Format tab. I can go in, I can resize it, I can Frame it, Color corrections, Artistic Effects, and so on. So I can process that in the same way that I could my own picture. For the next option we’re going to do Insert Shapes. Now when you do Insert Shapes, I’m afraid that the list, the gallery of shapes here runs off the bottom of the screen. When you do Insert Shapes, you have shapes in a number of categories. The first category we have Recently Used Shapes, then we have them by category such as lines, rectangles, basic shapes, block arrows, equation shapes, etc. Let’s suppose I take a basic shape. Let’s take that particular shape there, a trapezoid. Once I’ve selected it the cursor changes it shape to be the crosshair cursor and then I can draw this trapezoid. And it will be drawn in a default color and I can format it. Now in the case of drawing a shape, and note that this shape is selected, it has sizing handles on an outline around it, then we have an additional tab on the Ribbon, a Format tab. But this is a Drawing Tools Format tab. So this has different tools to the one we saw for Pictures. This has tools such as Shape Styles, WordArt Styles, and different Fill, Outline, and Effect Colors that we can apply to the shape. I’ll show you one or two of those in a moment. We also have size controls over here. And we can also put multiple shapes on the same picture. So having inserted that I could do Insert Illustration, insert another shape. Let’s say this time I choose that Basic Shape there, the pie. I could draw the pie on there and I could build up a composite picture. And note that as


Learn Excel 2013 I click between those shapes, I can determine which of them is the currently selected shape. You can actually group shapes together. You can effectively sort of glue them together so that they become single entities or like single entities anyway. And in that way, you can make much more complex shapes by sort of gluing things together. But let’s look at one or two of the basic things that we can do now, first of all, with the mouse and then we’ll do a couple of things using touch. Let’s do a bit of coloring in. We’ve got the trapezoid selected at the moment. If I click the Shape Fill button, I can choose another color, one of the Theme Colors or one of the Standard Colors or I can even go in and choose a Gradient such as that one or I could go in and choose a Texture such as that one. So in terms of how you can make these shapes appear, there’s a lot of flexibility in Excel 2013. If we take the other shape here, that one, we also have a Shape Styles Gallery and if you click on the drop down here there’s a whole gallery of possible Shape Styles. Notice these Shape Styles have letters in them with fonts and font colors and that’s because these can generally accommodate text as well. So let’s go for that color scheme there. Let’s click within that and let’s type some text. Once the shape has got the text, I can select the text and I could if I wanted to say go to the Home tab there and change the text to say a much bigger size. So again a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can do. Now, of course, virtually all of these things that you can do with the keyboard and mouse with shapes you can do with touch as well. Let’s stick with these two. If I tap say the back shape to select it, I can just slide it by just swiping my finger, just drop it wherever I like. Similarly if I click on the other one I can move that around. Note that the text moves with it because the text is a part of the shape. And there is a little rotation handle above the shape that’s selected at the moment. And I could do this obviously with the mouse as well. But I can rotate with my finger and note how the rotation works. If I tap on the rotation handle, select it, then I can rotate the whole shape. That’s just being done with my finger. Let’s put it back somewhere like where it was. But then if I tap the circle below the rotation handle, the one just at the top of the shape itself I get a different effect altogether with my finger on that in that now as I rotate that I change the sort of center angle for this shape. So I can make the slice out of the pie, which is what it looks like, a smaller or a larger angle. So I’ve effectively got sort of two points there at which I can cause some sort of rotation or transformation on the shape. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 So now let’s take a look at option four which is SmartArt. Now SmartArt is really a very powerful facility, but basically you’re talking here about groups of shapes which together either tell a story or represent a pattern or a workflow or something like that. So let’s take a particular example. Let’s suppose I want to use this piece of SmartArt here, click on OK, and what I actually get is a group of images; look like three gas pumps, petrol station pumps in a way. But you might use these as a representation for some sort of process or some information for a database store something like that. And what you can do with the tools associated with SmartArt is to create a very good graphical explanation or representation of the information that you’re trying to present in your workbook. So for instance here, I’ve got these three pumps here. Supposing I wanted to represent a kind of technical argument here, so I might say background for the first piece of text and then I might say overview for the second. Now watch as I type in that one of the things about SmartArt is that as you type in content or as you make various other changes to the content in SmartArt, it resizes itself to cater for the changes that you’re making. So I’m going to type some longer text here. Just watch what happens. Now sometimes it resizes, sometimes it just turns a line. It’ll have a limit on how small or large the text can be. Put in here, third piece of text. When I finish typing in the text, click on Close and in each of these I can add a picture. So if I wanted to put a picture in the top one again, I could choose a file, put some clip art in there, do a search, get something from SkyDrive, etc. So in this way I can use this background SmartArt with text, pictures of my choosing. Obviously I’ve got styles that I can choose from. I can look at formatting in terms of different Shape Fill. So I can go to Shape Fill there, change that particular one to a different color. So I’ve a very full set of design and formatting tools to go with all of this SmartArt. And it is quite surprising how often these kind of graphics can really help the presentation of a workbook in Excel 2013. So there’s just one more option to show you here which is the last one, Screenshot. This facility is common across Office 2013. All of the major components have this facility whereby you can quickly add a snapshot of any Window that’s open on your desktop to your document. This is quite useful when you’re trying to put information say from another application to either explain what’s going on in your workbook or maybe you’re using your workbook itself to explain this other effect or this other event. Now in my case, I haven’t really got anything significant otherwise open while I’m recording of this other than the software that’s recording me and what


Learn Excel 2013 I’m doing on the screen. But if I just click on Screenshot here, I’ll just basically show you how it works; click on Screen Clipping. Now the screens that are available, in this case it will only be my background, are sort of ghosted over. You’ll see them sort of grayed out. If you use the crosshair cursor to cut a bit of it out like that, when you release the cursor what happens is whatever you had in the rectangle you marked out with the cursor is inserted into the current worksheet. Now, of course, if I’d had say a program open or a database open, I could’ve gone to that and taken part of a screenshot from there and inserted that into my worksheet. So that was a quick tour of Shapes and Pictures in Excel 2013. I hope there’s plenty there for you to experiment with. Although we didn’t go into this in detail I believe I covered enough information there for you to do a little exercise on this. I’ve reopened Example 16. This is the latest version of the invoice for the plumbing company. What I’d like you to do is to put a logo, I think something like a rubber duck or something like that. It might look quite nice somewhere on this invoice. So I’ve given you a couple of clues. My answer is Example 17. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 25 – Sharing and Protecting Video: Protecting Worksheets Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section and the next section, we’re going to look at protection. We’re going to look at protecting worksheets in this section and workbooks in the next one. Now in order to demonstrate protecting worksheets, I’d like to look at the invoice that worked on earlier on in the course. And you may recall that when we started on the invoice, we didn’t have any formula or functions being used to fill in the data on the invoice. It was just directly typed in. Now if we look say at the phone number, the phone number of Ocean Plumbing themselves it’s still just text in Cell C8. But if we look in the phone number of the customer to whom this invoice is addressed, we’ve now got in there a VLOOKUP function. Now it would be very easy for somebody who perhaps didn’t quite know what they were doing to start typing in here a phone number and they would obliterate this Lookup Function, we’d lose it. We’d have to go back to an old version, put it in again. We don’t want people to be able to overwrite things that they shouldn’t be able to overwrite. It’s no longer necessary to type in this cell because the content of this cell is got from our database of customers by the VLOOKUP function. So the cell we need to be able to type into is that one, the account number cell. If we put the account number in there, it will automatically fill in that phone number. So what we need to do is to protect the phone number cell to stop people from typing into it. Now the way that we stop people typing into a cell is to lock it. And if you look at any of the cells on this sheet, you might be quite surprised to find that the cells are all locked already, by default the cells on a sheet are locked. Let me show you how you can tell. Let’s take this account number Cell, C17, the one where we type in the client account number, right click. If you then go to the Format Cells option one of the tabs is a Protection tab. And you’ll see that on the Protection tab, you have two options. You have a Locked option and a Hidden option. This cell is already locked. Now that particular cell, the one that contains the account number, I’m going to unlock. So all I’m going to do is click on the Locked, click on OK, that cell is now unlocked. Let’s go back to that phone number cell that we were looking at before, do the same


Learn Excel 2013 thing there. In fact, if you go to the Home tab, then on the drop down for format there is actually a Lock Cell option. And if you have the sort of pressed version of the button here, the padlock and it looks as though it’s on a square button, that cell is already locked. If I wanted to unlock it, if I clicked Lock Cell and then look at the option again notice all you can see now is the padlock itself. It doesn’t have the sort of square shape around it. So let me just lock it again. That cell is, of course, locked. That’s locked, that’s unlock. But at the moment I can actually type into either of them. Now the way that I actually make the locking work is to protect the worksheet. Click on Review tab and one of the buttons in the Changes Group there is Protect Sheet. And if I click on Protect Sheet, I get a little dialog, a Protect Sheet dialog. And this tick here means protect worksheet and contents of locked cells. This would in effect mean that the sheet and all locked cells are protected in a particular way. Now I can actually make a combination of things that users can and cannot do when this sheet is protected, using this list of check boxes at the bottom. So if I were to now protect the sheet, if I were to click OK to protect this sheet because I’ve got the check box saying Protect Worksheet, this is what would happen. Users could select locked cells, select unlocked cells. They could format cells, format columns, format rows. I don’t want them to be doing any formatting. I don’t want them to able to insert rows or columns, delete rows or columns, sort them, edit the objects, do anything like that. In fact, I don’t want them to be able to select Locked Cells. So I’m going to uncheck that first option. All I want people to be able to do is that, Select unlocked cells. Now I can use that. I can protect that sheet with or without a password. If I did it without a password, it’s more or less just avoiding people making little mistakes. Anybody who knows how to unprotect the sheet could unprotect it and do things to it. But if I put a password in there, then people could only unprotect the sheet if they had a password. Now on this occasion, I’m not going to use a password; I’m just going to click on Protect Sheet, click on OK. The Cell C17 is unlocked. I can change it. It says 2972 at the moment. If I change it to 2973, look for example at the unit cost down here or at the name and address details up here when I check that. Notice they update exactly as they were before. The big difference is this; I cannot click in any other cell on the sheet. I can’t select. I’m clicking away with the mouse here. I cannot select anything else on this sheet. The only cell I can get to is that one.


Learn Excel 2013 So if this were the only cell I needed to be able to enter information in, I could leave this sheet now like that and probably be quite happy that nobody could sort of mess up the rest of the sheet. But if at sometime I needed to change something about the sheet, all I have to do is click on Unprotect Sheet here and once I’ve clicked on Unprotect Sheet, I can, of course, click anywhere I like on the sheet. Now in this particular case, of course, in order to make this invoice work properly we would need to unlock the cells where we enter the product code and the cells where we enter order quantity. But we follow pretty much the same procedure in order to achieve that. Now one thing to point out in all of this is that in an Excel 2013 workbook, protection of a sheet is per sheet. So if you have, for example, three worksheets here you need to think about the protection of each of the worksheets individually. And of course, in the case of say the Catalogue of parts, you may argue that most users have no need ever to change anything on this sheet at all and maybe just one person has the password to this worksheet so that they can unlock the worksheet, add or update the part information, and then protect the sheet again so that nobody else can change either the contents of the sheet in terms of what parts are listed or the prices or the discounts or anything else. And a similar sort of argument might well apply in terms of customers. Although of course, it may be different people that maintain the customer list to the people that maintain the Catalogue. So, that’s the basics of protecting a worksheet. In the next section, we’re going to turn our attention to protecting a workbook. So please join me for that.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Protecting Workbooks Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In the preceding section we looked at protecting worksheets. In this section, we’re going to look at protecting workbooks. And I want to begin by looking at a very basic straightforward means of protecting a workbook and that is to protect it with a password so that somebody who doesn’t know the password cannot even open the workbook. So I’m going to demonstrate this using our invoice workbook again. I’m going to save it with a different name this time. If I click on File and then Save As; let’s suppose I’m going to save it in regular location. But I’m just for the moment going to call it 17A. Next to the Save button down here there is a tools button. And if I click on the drop down, there one of the options is General Options. Under General Options when I’m saving I can require a password for somebody to open the workbook. Now I’m going to put in a very straightforward password, it’s just tobya; five lower case letters, T-O-B-Y-A. I can also put in a password which people will need to know in order to be able to modify the workbook. This one I’m going to put as T-O-B-Y-B. I can then also check this check box, Read only recommended. And what this will do is that if somebody tries to open the workbook, it will recommend that they open it Read only and not in modify mode so that they can see what’s in the workbook but they can’t make any changes to it. So I’ve got a password to open it, a password to modify, and a read only recommended. I’m going to click on OK. It requires me to reenter the password to make sure that I’ve entered it correctly. It warns me about making sure I don’t forget the password. Same with the second password, then click on Save. I’m now going to close the workbook. Now let’s see what happens when I try to open it again. So now let me try to open that workbook. File, look at the list of Recent Workbooks, 17A, and it says there’s the workbook name. It says it is protected. I type in the first password to access the workbook at all. So I put that password in. And now it said if I want write access, so if I want to be able to modify it I’ve got to put in the second password effectively or I can choose to just open read only. So if I just want to read what’s in the workbook I can click on read only. I’ll be © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 able to see the content but I won’t be able to change anything. And in the header where it gives the file name, it actually has in brackets Read-only to remind me that I can only read the workbook. If I’d entered the second password, I would, of course, be able to modify the workbook. So there’s a couple of basic aspects of workbook protection. But I should warn you that there a couple of things about that that you need to be very wary of. And in fact there is a much more significant issue that we’ll look at in just a moment. Let’s start with one of the things to be wary of. If somebody can open a workbook in modify mode, so they’ve got the ability to write. So they’ve got the second password if you like, using the example that we saw just now. They could, of course, resave that workbook with a different password. So they could effectively lock you out. So you’ve got to be very careful about how you give people permission to access your workbooks, who you give the passwords to and so on. And another thing to be wary of is that some aspects of protection of workbooks can be quite confusing in Excel 2013. You may have noticed a button next to Protect Sheet on the Review tab called Protect Workbook. And you may think, well isn’t that the button to protect this workbook? Well it is, but only in one sense, and that is that this button can enable you to lock the structure of the workbook, which means that somebody cannot change the structure which includes things like changing the order of the worksheets within the workbook and so on. Now again, you could protect this structure without a password, it’s optional. You could protect it with a password. But if I put a password on it, I’m actually going to put the password on here of tobyc, click on OK. I’m asked to reenter it to confirm; the usual thing about losing passwords. That’s now protected. Now if I were to say try to move the Catalogue Sheet before the Invoice Sheet watch what happens. I get a “No entry” sign down at the bottom. I can’t do that. Let me try and drag Customers, I can’t do that. Let me try to Delete Customers. I can’t because all of the operations I can normally perform are grayed out and there are only certain things I can do such as view the code. If I want to unprotect the workbook again, to unprotect it I just need to type in the password. But that’s got nothing to do with being able to open the workbook in general.


Learn Excel 2013 Now finally I’d like to turn my attention to this major issue that you need to be aware of. Let’s go back to Backstage View, in the Info Page right up the top, Protect Workbook and note it’s got a note here. A password is required to open this workbook. If I click on the Protect Workbook button, there are several other aspects of protecting a workbook. We can do things like if you look at the bottom option, add a digital signature. With restrict access, we can actually connect to DRM, Digital Rights Management Servers and get templates. We can also grant people access while removing their ability to edit, copy, or print. We can actually look into protecting a workbook in a very detailed way in terms of who can access it and what they can do to it. Then we’ve got Protect Workbook Structure that we looked at just now, protecting the current sheet, etc. But perhaps the most important of all is “Encrypt with password.” If you password protect a workbook in the way that we did earlier on in this section, you can stop people opening it in Excel but that won’t stop people opening your workbook in other software. And it’s very straightforward for somebody who knows what they’re doing to write a piece of software or use a piece of software that can read your workbook and bypass the password system. Now the man in the street if you like wouldn’t necessarily be able to do that, but somebody who had enough interest in the contents of your workbook and was reasonably technically competent wouldn’t really have a lot of trouble in doing this. The way that you can largely eliminate this problem is to encrypt the workbook, which means that if somebody could access the workbook whether or not they had the password to open it, the data in it would be encrypted and they wouldn’t be able to make any sense out of it. Now it’s true always that if somebody really wants to do something hard enough and they’re clever enough they can bypass anything. But the encryption with Excel is very good encryption and it would stop the vast majority of people being able to access the data in your workbook. So if you click on Encrypt with password, you’re asked to enter a password. I’ve already got this workbook encrypted. But you put in a password of your choosing. You get the usual warning about forgetting passwords and so on and with that password, click on OK, the workbook is now encrypted. So even if somebody could now get the physical file, maybe try to open it and find that they were prevented from opening it, and they therefore tried to access it with a different piece of software, they would find that the data in it was all encrypted and they couldn’t make any sense of it.


Learn Excel 2013 Now for the sake of reassurance, I should point out that if you encrypt a workbook, it doesn’t come through as encrypted data when you’re reading it in Excel. It looks exactly the same in Excel. It’s only if somebody tries to access the data without going through the Excel security system that it will appear to be encrypted.

Now in general terms to remove any of this

protection, you go through pretty much the same steps but you delete the passwords and that will remove the affects. So for instance, if I’ve got Protect Workbook here I go on Encrypt with password, all I really need to do is to delete the password altogether, click on OK, and this particular workbook is no longer encrypted. Similarly, if I do a Save As, if I clear the password fields on the Save As, then the workbook will no longer require the passwords to either be opened or to be opened in modify mode. Now I’m going to leave you with a little exercise to do here. I started with Example 17 before. I’m going to save as Example 18, a copy of 17 but with a full set of passwords on it. Now the password in every case is tobya, T-O-B-Y-A. You should be able to go in and remove those passwords, access the workbook as normal, check you can do all of that. Do the same with your own workbook or one of your own workbooks, your own copy of Example 17, for example, put your own passwords on and make sure that you’re comfortable with the way that workbook protection works. That’s it in this section. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Video: Sharing and SkyDrive Toby: Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I want to talk about Sharing in general and the use of SkyDrive in particular. And I’m going to begin by talking about sharing a workbook in general. Now if you’ve got a workbook that you need other people to work on, one option is for you to do your work on the workbook, send them a copy of the workbook, e-mail it to them or perhaps put it on a memory stick or a DVD or something, they do their work on it, send it back to you, you correct what they’ve done or check what they’ve done, and so on. And many people work on workbooks collaboratively in that kind of way. But also for quite a long time, it’s been possible for people to simultaneously work on the same workbook; so for two or more people to have the same workbook open and to work on it at the same time. Now whether or not you’ve ever actually tried to do that, you can probably see inherently a few problems or potential problems there in terms of say in the case of this one of two people typing in the same cell at the same time or maybe one of them deleting what the other persons just done and so on. Now there’s actually quite a long list of things you can and can’t do when two people have a workbook open at the same time. And I’m not going to go into that long list now. But for example when you have a workbook open for sharing, you can type text and numbers but you can’t merge cells. You can’t Insert Charts or other Objects. You can’t assign passwords. So there are a lot of limitations on what you can do, but having said that many people still find sharing workbooks to be a very useful thing to be able to do. So, up until recently, the main way of doing that was to share a workbook by placing it on a network. So you might put a workbook like the one we’re looking at here on a network drive. I can access it, somebody else can access it. We can both open it at the same time and we can both do this limited amount of things to it at the same time. And provided the things we can do and the things we can’t do still accommodate what we want to achieve it actually works quite well. One more recent change to this situation though is that nowadays increasingly people are sharing workbooks and indeed other files to use the terminology in the Cloud or in the case of Microsoft, on SkyDrive. So effectively, you can use SkyDrive as your sort of network drive, your place to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 keep a shared workbook and you and other people, other people with the necessary permissions, can open the workbook at the same time. But let’s look first at, if you like, the traditional situation and for the purposes of this I just want you to imagine that this particular workbook is on a network drive and myself, some of my colleagues can access this workbook on that network drive. Now in order to share this workbook, I need to effectively prepare it for sharing. And there is a button on the Review tab in the Changes Group called Share Workbook. So I click on Share Workbook and to share the workbook, it’s very straightforward. All I need to do is to check this check box, Allow changes by more than one user at the same time. This also allows workbook merging. Now at the moment who has this workbook open now? Well, it’s just me. And in brackets, you should just about be able to see there, Exclusive. That means I have exclusive use of this workbook at the moment, only I have it open and only I can have it open because until I enable sharing, other users cannot open it at the same time as me. Click on OK. Now when I do that, this action will now save the workbook. Do you want to continue? Now when we do this the workbook will be saved, but also from this point onwards when somebody opens the workbook, they’ll see that it’s a shared workbook. So if I click on OK, notice at the top it now says Shared in brackets. And somebody opening this workbook would see shared which would tell them that potentially or actually somebody else is sharing this workbook. So let me just click on share workbook again. Notice now that it’s got my name as the user with the workbook open but it no longer says Exclusive. It’s just got Toby Arnott and then the date and time. Now to remove that sharing, all I have to do is to click the check box again, click OK, and I get a warning there. This action will remove the workbook from shared use. The change history will be erased and other users who are editing this workbook will not be able to save their changes. So I’m going to say Yes on this occasion. Obviously, if other people had this open at the time I was trying to remove sharing, I’d probably need to have a word with them, give them a call or something, send them a message to say I’m removing sharing from this workbook to make sure that nobody who’s doing a lot of work on it loses a lot of work. So click on Yes and it’s now back to regular non-shared use.


Learn Excel 2013 Now let’s look at sharing on SkyDrive. With SkyDrive there’s actually a pretty good procedure to go through. First of all, I should point out that in order to do this yourself you’re going to need access to SkyDrive which means that you’ll need a Microsoft account. If you’ve got a Hotmail account or a Microsoft Live ID that will do the job. But you need to get your SkyDrive setup first. Mine is already setup. I’ll show you in just a moment where you can go to setup SkyDrive. If you don’t know what SkyDrive is it’s basically storage which you can access from pretty much anywhere in world given a suitable device. If you’re a user of Microsoft Software such as Office 2013, you have a free allowance of space on SkyDrive. I think that at the time of recording this, the free allowance is something like 7 GB. I’m not absolutely sure. Obviously that may change. Also if you need more space than that, there are paid plans whereby you can have more space on SkyDrive. I refer you to Microsoft.com for all of this. I have got some space available on SkyDrive. And what I’m going to do is I made a copy of this workbook. I’ve called it 8A and I’m going to store it on SkyDrive and then I’m going to show you how I and other people can access it on SkyDrive. So go into Backstage View, one of the options down there is Share. Now I should point out that with the Share option one of the Share options, the bottom one, is e-mail. Now this is not the same as obviously sharing a workbook in the sense of a number of people having the workbook open at the same time. But this is a handy set of links to way of sending a workbook to other people. So we’ve got Send as an attachment, Send as a PDF, Send as an XPS, Send as an Internet Fax. That’s a good way of accessing some of those straightforward ways of not really sharing a workbook but sending a workbook. The one we’re interested in though is this one, Share, Invite people. Step one, save your document to a SkyDrive location. Step two, share your document. We’ll do this after you’ve finished saving. So, save to Cloud first and that goes to Toby SkyDrive. If you don’t already have your SkyDrive setup, then if you click on the Learn More Link here, it will take you through to Microsoft.com and more information about setting it up. So let’s just have a quick look at that. Now the lnk here takes you through to an area of the Microsoft Live, Live.com website, and explains to you about the SkyDrive Desktop App. And you can use this to basically synchronize files between the devices you use using SkyDrive as your sort of central storage location in the Cloud. If you want to use that it explains how to download that and towards the bottom of the page gives you the system requirements to do that.


Learn Excel 2013 You will need a Microsoft account to do this and to setup SkyDrive anyway to actually get the space you will need a Microsoft account. So if you already have a suitable Microsoft mail account, then you should have no problem setting up SkyDrive at all. So let’s go back to actually saving this workbook to my SkyDrive. Now when you choose to save something to SkyDrive you can think of SkyDrive as a sort of removable storage device if you like. So when you come to go into your SkyDrive, you see a top level folder. You can have folders within that. I’ve got a couple of folders. I’ve already got an existing workbook saved here. You can create new folders. So I could put say all of the work associated with a particular project, I could put the workbooks into a particular folder. But I’m just going to save this one at the top level. So I click on Save and that workbook has now been uploaded to SkyDrive. So the workbook has now been saved to my SkyDrive and I can potentially share it with other people. Now, of course, the other people don’t even know it’s there at the moment. If you look at the Info Page from Backstage View for this shared file, note we have a little link here now introduced Toby’s SkyDrive. And if I click on Toby’s SkyDrive, it says Share or Get a Link. Now let’s click on Share or Get a Link. Now that enables me to invite other people to look at this document and potentially share this document. Now what I can do is I can either invite people by typing their names or e-mail addresses in here or I can get a sharing link. Now if I get the link as it says there this is useful if you’re sharing with large groups of people or when you don’t know the e-mail addresses of everyone you want to share with. What you can do with you can get a link and then you could include that in, for instance, an e-mail to a distribution list of people and that would give everybody in the list access to the link. You can also use the button here to post to social networks and there’s also an e-mail option here. Again, this sends us back to the e-mail links for sending that we saw before. But it also includes sending a link. So, various ways that I can send people the link to this document. Let me go back to the Invite people option. I’m going to invite a person here. I’m going to invite somebody else. In fact, to be honest, it’s one of my other addresses so that I don’t have to give away the identity of another person. That’s somebody else with a Microsoft account. And before I actually invite this person, I want you to look at this drop down on the right here, Can edit and Can view. Now with © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013 the links and the other things that we’ve looked at just now, there are two versions of the links to this workbook. One link will enable the person to edit it. The other link will only them to view it. So if I want toby.a to be allowed to edit this workbook, I give them this link or I should say in this case this invite. If I only want them to be able to view it, I can just click here on Can view. So let’s suppose I want toby.a to be able to view this only. Select “Can view” and then all I need to do is to click on Share. I could put a little personal message in here with the invitation if I want to. So I could say something like, Hi Toby. Click on Share and SkyDrive does its stuff, Excel does its stuff, and when this has been successfully shared, I’ll see the other Toby appear. That Toby cannot edit the workbook. Going back to get a sharing link again for the way, you would send people a View Link or an Edit Link depending on what you wanted them to be able to do. So what I’m going to do now is login with my other account and look at the message that I got about accessing this workbook. So here I am about to login using that other account. So click on Sign in. I see I’ve got 10 unread messages. Click on the first message and it says Toby has shared a document with you. Now because of the anti-virus system and so on I’ve got to click on the link here to say Show Content and then this Link to the document becomes enabled, click on that, it’ll take me to the original Toby SkyDrive and will take me to this workbook. Now when it opens this workbook, it opens it in the Excel Web App. So it hasn’t opened it in full Microsoft Excel. And this is very useful because if I send this link to people that don’t have Microsoft Excel installed, they’ll get the Excel Web App. And this really enables the person, in this case. this Toby only has the rights to read the workbook anyway, can’t make any changes. But it enables the person to see what’s in the workbook even if they don’t have Excel installed. If I had given this Toby Edit access to the workbook that would have been able to go in and do some editing; although exactly what could be edited would be restricted by the use of the Web App. So there we are. There are quite a few other aspects to the sharing of a workbook using SkyDrive, but I hope from this you’ve got the basic idea of how it works and I believe that it works pretty well. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 26 – More Backstage View Options Video: Trust Center, Export; Inspect Workbook Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at a few items in Backstage View that we haven’t covered already. So far we’ve looked at most of the items in Backstage View but there’s still one or two others I’d just like to quickly point out because they’re quite important. So let me open one of the very original files, go back into Backstage View. We looked at Options. We’ve been through quite a few of these. One area we didn’t look at, at all was the Trust Center. Now the Trust Center settings are very important and they become even more important if you get into writing Macros or dealing with Macro Code, which you won’t have done so far on this course. But there are a couple of Trust Center settings I’d like to point out to you because they can at the worst be a bit of a nuisance and at best you need to understand them well enough to take advantage of them. If I click on Trust Center Settings, down at the bottom there is a selection Privacy Options and one of the Privacy Options right near the top, Allow Office to connect to the internet. Now if there are situations where you don’t want to connect to the internet be aware of having this option set because Excel if it wants certain things such as online help, it will try to connect to the internet. You can suppress it in that way. Another thing that’s really quite useful is the Document Inspector. I’ll come back to that in just a moment. Further up here, Protected View. Now you may have seen this already. If you download an Office Document, particularly something like an Excel workbook, you may see Protected View appear. And if that happens, what it’s designed to protect you from potentially dangerous Excel workbooks. You need to take that warning quite seriously. Now if you’re downloading a document from a source, you know and you’re 100% confident then you can pretty much switch off what protective view does on that particular document. But bear in mind that this and many other features of the Trust Center are there really to protect you from using Excel content that could harm your computer. So deal with that carefully. Don’t switch it off. You could go in here and switch all these off, click on OK, and protected view would never bother you again. But just be wary because it can protect you from harmful content.


Learn Excel 2013 One other option we haven’t looked at, at all in Backstage View is Export. But in fact what Export does is pretty much all the same as we get with Save As, which we did look at in quite a bit of detail earlier on. So within the Export Page in Backstage View, we have Export, Create PDF or XPS Document, which we did before.

And then Change File type gives us an

opportunity to save as XLSX, the older format XLS, template, macro-enabled workbook, and two or three of the other options that we saw earlier on as well. So effectively it’s another way of doing a Save As. And the last option, I’d like to look at is on the Info tab and that’s Inspect Workbook, check for issues. And this is a very good thing to run before you publish a File. Now if I click on Check for issues, I can see there are three categories. Inspect the document; check the workbook for hidden properties or personal information. So I can use that to just make sure I haven’t left a name or some sort of identifying mark in there, if in fact I intended to remove them all. I can check the workbook for content that people with disabilities might find difficult to read. So I can check Accessibility and I can check Compatibility. I can check for features not supported by earlier versions of Excel. So with the particular workbook, I’ve got open at the moment if I say do Inspect Document, it lets me check for issues in a number of categories. I don’t have to check all of them. It’ll only check the ones that are ticked. So I’m going to do everything that the Document Inspector can do. So, click on Inspect, and it comes back with a little model. It ticks most things, but where it comes down here with an exclamation mark, Document properties and personal information. The following document information was found; Document properties, the author and an absolute path to the workbook. Now it may well be, as in this case, that I knew about putting my own name in there and so on and the other properties. So I may be completely happy about that. Back to Inspect Workbook again; let’s do a Check Compatibility. The following features in this workbook are not supported by earlier versions of Excel. And there are none. So in fact I could save this in one of the earlier formats without any problem at all. Let’s go back, one last check. Let’s check for accessibility issues, and what the accessibility checker does is to come back with any potentially problematic accessibility issues related to this workbook. So, I’ve covered now pretty much all of the options that are available on Backstage View. I’ll see you in the next section. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Excel 2013

Chapter 27 – Closing Video: Summary; More Help Toby: Hello again and welcome to this final section of our course on Excel 2013. In this section, I’m not going to cover any new material at all, but I would like to just summarize a couple of important points. One of them is that Excel is a huge product and it has a lot of features and functionality. Some of those features we didn’t even get a chance to look at on this course. Some of them are related to programming, to writing VBA, and so on. It’s very important that you practice everything that we’ve covered and certainly everything that’s particularly important to you. As I’ve said two or three times on the course, there are a number of different ways of doing most things and the way that I’ve shown you may not be the way that suits you the best in the future. So make sure that you look at the online help. Make sure you look at the various Microsoft forums, particularly forums related to Excel. And the other point I’d like to make is that I’m recording this course quite early in the life of Excel 2013. As time goes on, Microsoft will produce more and more training material, articles, features, write papers, and so on related to the use of Excel 2013 and it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the Microsoft Website, to keep checking the latest version of the Help and so on because you’re bound to find more help and guidance on the use of the features of Excel 2013 as time goes on and as people discover more and more about how to use what I think is a really great product. So, that’s the end of the course. My name is Toby. I hope you’ve enjoyed following the course as much as I have preparing it and delivering it to you. And I hope to see you online again sometime soon. Bye for now.
