Microsoft Excel for dummies - learn the basics of Excel

have you ever wanted to learn microsoft excel but you didn't know where to start or maybe you needed it for a new job you got hired for today i'm going to show you how to get started with absolute zero knowledge of microsoft excel and by the end of this video you'll know how to create a basic spreadsheet then going forward we'll create advanced spreadsheets and expand upon your knowledge so you'll be a wizard in no time get your coffee let's get started stick around at the end of the video for an amazing bonus tip that's going to save your life many times over this coffee cup make my video look big so in this first lesson i'm going to introduce you to the concept of microsoft excel this is designed for someone who has never actually used the product maybe you've heard of microsoft excel but you've never thought you've had a need for it you can do everything from tracking contacts to creating extraordinary spreadsheets that calculate all kinds of data including budgets expenses i actually use it to help run my business and keep up with my monthly income i can categorize everything and keep it nice and neat and tidy and that's why i like it there are two primary ways that people create spreadsheets one is through a program called microsoft excel that's this right here there is another way you can use a program called openoffice and it has the same functionality as microsoft excel if you'd like to know more about the differences between the two programs click on the link above i made a video about it and that might help you out a little bit choosing which one you want so to get started you're going to find your excel shortcut on your desktop and double click it when the program opens up just click on blank workbook so now you have a new spreadsheet to start working in what you see here on the screen is one worksheet you can create multiple worksheets as you can see down here but for now we're going to focus on just the one worksheet to keep it simple each of these spaces is what's known as a cell this is a1 this is c10 going across the top you have a list of letters going from a to z down the bottom left side you see there are numbers each cell represents a coordinate from a combination of the letter and the number if you've ever played battleship as a kid you know exactly what this is so for example this cell right here it's in column d and row 7 so that means that this cell is d7 there are so many different things you can do with microsoft excel and i'm just going to show you a few very basic things starting off and then we'll get a little bit more advanced in the next video so for example say you want to keep up with your contact list what you want to do here is you want to leave this first row open especially if you're ocd like me because this row will be the header column in other words what is this column represent i will put name and then i will put address and then i will put phone number and then email and maybe i want to put birthday and anniversary and say favorite beverage and in this cell you can put children's names now as you can see this looks really ugly because these words are all overwriting each other and this is where you can have some fun with excel all you have to do is highlight this vertical separator between the columns and you see the mouse see how it changes to a vertical line once it does that you click on your left mouse and you can literally slide it over until it's wide enough to accommodate the name of the header we'll put in some sample information here for you so you can kind of get an idea of how this works so let's say susan thompson and susan i if you're watching this one's for you so her address is one two three any street let's say beverly hills california 90210 and say her phone number is 555-2121 and say her email address is s thompson madeup stuff.com as you can see here the email address is longer than the cell so i just simply go back and select the column drag it over until it fits now her birthday let's make her birthday march 15 of 1982 and let's say her anniversary date is april 1st 2000 say susan's favorite beverage is red moscato wine and she has two children ami who is 14 and evan who is 9. now we have all the information we need on our friend now if you're really ocd like me this right here would drive you crazy you see here this birthday is with slashes and this one is different well it is the formatting that does that so what you want to do select top of the e column click and hold drag it over to this column and let go now you have these two entire columns selected now you can let go of the mouse right click on the selected columns and click format cells when you do that now you have the option to format them in a specific way excel gives you different ways to do it under number currency and so on but also by date now if you look when you click on date see it gives you all the different ways you can write an actual date some people would put 14 march some people would put 3 4 some people with 3 14 some people would write out march 14th in this case i like this method 0 3 14 and so on so you select that and click ok and now if you look both of the dates here are formatted correctly so if you'll notice here when you type in an email address when you click on it it will then prompt you through what's called a mailto hyperlink just like if you clicked an email address on the web when you click on it it will then automatically bring up your mail program and pre-populate the two with that person's name and so just like this you can very easily use excel to keep up with your contact and have a nice organized way to keep up with all your information it's still a little disorganized and i like to keep it nice and tidy what i like to do is make my headers centered across the columns so i will click on this column here and while holding the mouse down i will literally go all the way across to the last column and let go as you can see now all the headers are highlighted you have tons of features up here as far as formatting you can click here to make them bold you can change your fonts as you go through your list of fonts how it changes on your spreadsheet but i also have options for centering this right here aligns everything to the left this aligns everything into the center of the header and this aligns everything to the right what you always want to do is make sure that you save the file here is your bonus tip when using excel make sure you hit control s on your keyboard as often as possible what this does is saves your document or your spreadsheet while you're working on it this way if you have a system crash or a power outage you won't lose your document after spending hours and hours working on it so now that you know the basics go and create some spreadsheets for yourself play with it have some fun with it

Channel: Ask Your Computer Guy

Views: 96,685

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Id: UR2830RUWmQ

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021