How to use Microsoft Excel Guides

Do you know how to use Microsoft Excel? Create spreadsheets? Merge cells? Or create formulas?

We have a range of video tutorials and ‘how to’ guides available to improve you IT and Microsoft Excel skills.  Dive in and take a look.

How to create a simple spreadsheet and table on excel
How to find the sum and create a automatic formula in excel
How to create formulas unique to your table

FAQ's

  • It’s really easy to do, first you write the title you want merging, and then highlight all the cells you want this title to run across. 
  •  You go to the menu, under the ‘Home’ tab and look for the icon that has two arrows facing the opposite direction.  It is usually under the 'abc' icon, which is used to fit a paragraph into one cell without it merging over to another cell. 
  • Click the drop down, which will give different options and click the one you want.
  •  And there you have it.  You then add a border to make it look nicer and that is how you merge cells. 

Have a look at the videos for a more indepth example.

  • Click the cell you want the amount to appear in.  Go to the menu tab at the top make sure it’s on ‘Home’ 
  • You are looking for a symbol, kind of like a strange looking letter ‘E’  which stands for ‘auto-sum’ meaning it atomically calculates the cells you want. 
  • This symbol is sometimes under a search icon labelled ‘editing’ depending on your computer. 
  • When we click sum it automatically highlights the cells with numbers in, if it doesn’t you can just highlight the cells you want to calculated. 
  • Then press enter 
  • If you want to do the same for each of the months.  Drag the cell across and it will atomically know to calculate the amount of each month 
  • If you look at the formula, each cell will be calculating that column. 

Have a look at the videos for a more indepth example.

  • First, click on the cell you want to colour code first.  As when you colour code that cell you can drag this across the rows or colums. 
  • Under the home tab at the top, there is an option for conditional formatting.  Click this the see the options. 
  • There a different options of how you can highlight.  The most common is based on is a number is greater or less than a value.
  • If you start with less that you enter a number you that you want the cell to be highlighted when the value is below.  For examle add in the value of -1 and keep it with a red colour and click ok.  This will mean that if the value is -1 or less then the cell will go red. 
  • Do the same for ‘greater than’ but put the value as 0 and change the colour to green.  Now as the cell value is greater than 0 is automatically goes green. 
  • Now drag the cell all the way across the row so all the other cells have this rule and you can see them change colour, so it is a lot easier to see the value and pin point the positive and negative cells. 
  • You can use this for any type of spreadsheet or table you are creating that may look better and easier to red with colours. 

Take a look at the videos for a more indepth example/

  • There are many types of formulas you can use for excel.  You need to be clear on what you need.  If you want to find the 'sum', average' or 'mean', you can use the sum icon and highlight the cells you want to incorporate in the sum.
  • If you want to create a formula from scratch, in the cell you want it to appear in, you always start with an = sign
  • For example if you have your yearly income and yearly costs and want to find out the amount of disposable income, you would create a formula with = [click the yearly income cell] - [click the yearly costs cell] then press enter.

You can see a more indepth example on formulas in excel in our videos

  • Freezing a row or column means when you have a lot of data in a table, you can scroll through it but the row/column that is frozen stays the same.
  • It is useful when a table has lots of information in and you can to scroll across or down but want to match the cells to a category.
  • Highlight the whole column/row you want to freeze then find and click ‘view’ along the menu tab at the topOn there you will find a few options to freeze frame and click whichever is best for you. 

You can watch a more indepth example in our excel videos.

  • When you create a table and have a lot of data it can be time consuming and difficult to make the cells all the same size.
  • I cheat can be if you want just one cell increasing to ensure all content (a sentence for example) fits, go to the row header and  double click the edge of the cell on the row  (labeled A, B, C and so on).  The cursor Icon will change to a line in the middle with two arrows in opposite direction, when you are at the edge of the cell.
  • If you want a number of cells or the same length then highlight all cells on the by clicking one on the row heading and dragging you cursor across all rows you want.  Then go to any of the highlighted cells on the row header, and to the edge of just one of the cells (until the cursor changes icon) and drag the cell to the size you want. It will do the same for all cells.
  • You can do the same on the column header too (1, 2, 3, 4 and so on)

For more in depth examples of excel you can view our video guides.