Getting Started

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If you have a copy of Microsoft Excel, you'll notice upon launching the application that a spreadsheet is nothing more than a group of rectangles (called cells) organized into vertical rows and horizontal columns.

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When you begin typing in a cell, the formula bar will change as well.  It is important to remember to hit the enter key when you are done typing into a cell.  If you want to edit the contents of a cell, you can position your cursor in the formula bar and edit the cell’s contents just as you would in a word processor.

You can select a range of cells by dragging the mouse while holding down the shift key. You can select individual cells that are not connected by clicking on the cell while holding down the control key.

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You can copy information from one cell to another by selecting the cell to copy and then pressing Ctrl and C at the same time. Next, select the cell or cells to receive the copied information and push Ctrl and V at the same time.

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Column widths can be changed and cells can be formatted to display bold text. Numbers can be formatted to display currency and other number formats. Formatting numbers does not change the value; only the way the value is displayed.

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Each cell can store up to 32,767 characters of information.  The kind of information you can store in a cell falls into one of three categories:

·Numbers

·Strings, which can be a collection of any of the characters you can find on your keyboard

·Formulas 

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