Excel Primer for xls version To Start Excel Double click on the Excel icon or select the program from the menu often found under Recent Applications A blank workbook page should appear containing a grid of cells with letters labeling columns and numbers labeling rows If you don t have a blank Excel sheet you can obtain one by selecting File from the uppermost menu and then New On newer versions of Excel you will first open the Project Gallery and then open the Excel Workbook To Enter Numbers and or text Click in the cell that you wish to type in Enter numbers or text headings as desired You can type in the formula bar or you can type directly into the target cell To enter your new information click on the green or press the Enter key If you change your mind and you want to leave the contents of the cell unchanged after you have started typing just press the red X button Your new text will be discarded Formatting of cells can be accomplished by highlighting the cells you wish to have the formatting apply to and selecting the desired formatting option This option can be selected on the toolbar for example B stands for bold click on it to choose it or by pulling down the Format menu and choosing Cells In particular you can change the number of significant figures displayed For example type PI into a cell just to get an example number The result will be shown as 3 14159265 Now highlight the cell pull down the Format menu and choose Cells Click on the Number tab and the Number category Change the number of decimal points to the desired number If you choose 3 decimal places the PI cell will now appear as 3 142 You can also use the Scientific category to force the results to be listed in scientific notation To Enter Formulas in Excel To have Excel do a calculation for you type the appropriate formula in the cell you wish the desired answer to appear starting with an sign Examples a to add the number in cell B1 to the value in cell E7 and have this sum appear in cell G22 type B1 E7 in cell G22 then press the Enter key b to multiply the number in A5 by that in B5 and subtract 10 and have the value appear in C5 type A5 B5 10 in cell C5 and then press the Enter key Note that division is denoted by a backslash and multiplication is denoted by c to calculate the average median and standard deviation for the numbers in cells D3 to D22 type AVERAGE D3 D22 MEDIAN D3 D22 and STDEV D3 D22 respectively in the cells you wish these values to appear Note that the colon specifies a range of cells Another way to implement these and many other functions is to use the Function Wizard icon at the top of your screen denoted by fx Click on the cell in which you want the final answer to appear Now click the fx icon Select the function desired such as AVERAGE for average The prompt will ask you for what range of cells do you want the average You have two options at this point one is to reply to the prompt by entering the beginning and end of the range for example C2 C55 the second option is to highlight the cells desired to be included using the mouse This is a time saver when you have a lot of data to manipulate Repeating Calculations Filling cells down or across Now we get to the real power of spreadsheet applications As an example lets make an interest table for a bank Assume the interest rate is 5 4 and we want to calculate the yearly interest for a range of deposits If the first deposit is in cell C3 the interest can be calculated by the formula 5 4 C3 100 We can now easily repeat this calculation with automatic row filling So start by entering new values for the deposit is successive rows then highlight the formula cell you entered above special fill handle Click on the special fill handle and drag down to the row with your last deposit value The calculation will now be automatically filled in for you deposit interest 2000 108 3000 162 4000 216 5000 270 Notice the formulas that have be entered automatically for you deposit 2000 3000 4000 5000 interest 5 4 C3 100 5 4 C4 100 5 4 C5 100 5 4 C6 100 Excel is smart enough to change the cell address to reflect the different deposit values for you automatically This mode is called relative addressing You can fill formulas down rows or across columns This ability is the real time saving advantage of using a spreadsheet program Relative verses Absolute Cell Addresses Row filling is very handy except there are times when you don t want Excel to automatically adjust the cell references in your formulas Lets look at a specific example The interest calculation above is a good example Note that we put the interest rate directly into the formula However the interest rate at banks changes from day to day It would be better to put the interest rate into a cell so that you can change just the one cell when the interest rate changes interest rate 5 4 deposit 2000 3000 4000 5000 Interest B2 C3 100 However if you try to fill this formula down for the next row Excel will change the formula to B3 C4 100 try it Of course the interest rate is still in cell B2 To tell Excel not to change the cell reference put signs in front of the column and row interest rate 5 4 deposit 2000 3000 4000 5000 Interest B 2 C3 100 Now filling this formula down will give the proper result interest rate 5 4 deposit 2000 3000 4000 Interest B 2 C3 100 B 2 C4 100 B 2 C5 100 5000 B 2 C6 100 Making a Graph Highlight the data you wish to plot which should be in adjacent columns Then select Chart from the Insert menu or use the Chart Wizard icon from the toolbar it looks like a 3 dimensional bar graph Choose the appropriate options in each window Since you can go back don t be afraid to try different options to see what they do to familiarize yourself with the different features However it is prudent to only change one major option at a time to see what that feature does and to make it easy to remember what to change back if necessary For your labs this semester you will use XY scatter type of plots It is usually best to choose the sub type that does not connect the dots We will add a trendline later to approximate the data density g mL It is often necessary to adjust the scale of the axes You should have the data fill the plot area For example for the plot 10 9 8 7 …