16 - Excel Basics

Microsoft Excel is used all over the world in practically every company. It’s most commonly used as a makeshift database and to perform straightforward calculations. It’s also used to make graphs and charts although there are much better programs to make publication quality charts and graphs.

In this lectures, we’ll focus on using Excel in the following ways:

• Excel Components: Workbook, Worksheet, Cell, Text Boxes, File operations

• Excel Cell Operations: Moving around, Copying, Pasting, Inserting, Deleting, Formatting, Filling Cells

• Named Cells and Ranges, Performing an example calculation with named cells

• Intro to Functions: count, average, sum, max, min, etc.

• Locked cells and fill with example calculations

• Basic Plotting of data with line plots, bar graphs, and pie charts

• Loading data into Excel

See the Excel file (excelbasics.xlsx) in Canvas as well as this file that includes some of the in-class exercises: clint-bg/comptools