Ultimate Excel Course – Lecture # 1 | Overview of Excel

In our first lesson I’ll introduce you to the structure of Excel sheets and we will learn more about each of the elements that you see on the screen. This part of the Excel screen is called the Ribbon. It is the strip of buttons and icons located above the work area.

The ribbon has a number of tabs such as “Home”, “Insert”, “Page layout”, etc.

Each tab contains relevant commands, depending on the type of action that you would like to carry out. Below the Ribbon we have the workspace area. As you can see Excel sheets are composed of multiple cells and contain many rows and columns.

The letters from A to Z are used in order to make the various columns. The first one is A while the second one is B and so on. An Excel sheet contains 16,384 columns. That’s a lot, right? We have a very similar thing with rows. Every row is identified by a number. We have 1,2, 3 going all the way down to 1,048,576. To sum up 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows. I’m sure you understand how powerful the program is by this point.

And this is just one sheet.

We can add as many sheets as we’d like, by using the “Insert worksheet” button. We can work contemporaneously on multiple sheets too. I’ll show you how it’s done a little later.

So in order to add a new sheet, we can use the “Insert sheet” button. What if we want to delete the sheet? If that’s the case, I can click on it with the right mouse button and select “Delete sheet”. 

It is very easy to trace cells in Excel, thanks to the way sheets are organized. Every cell’s coordinates are given by the letter and number corresponding to the column and row where it lies. So for example the first cell in the worksheet is A1 given that it lies at the intersection of column A and row number 1. The only part of Excel’s layout that we haven’t yet discussed are these two bars right here. This is the “name box” and this here is the “formula bar”. The “name box” shows the name of the active cell where we’re at. I can select a different cell and its coordinates will be displayed in the “name box”.

See what I mean? The “Formula bar” allows us to edit or enter information, numbers, text, formulas within a given cell. It allows us to visualize the formulas or the content of a cell. The “formula bar” is really useful when we start typing Excel functions too. Once you start typing, it displays suggestions of functions that you might be looking for. 

We will discuss about Data Entry and basics of excel Formatting in the upcoming lecture. Thanks for watching!