If you're just learning to use Excel, learning to navigate efficiently is a crucial building block that will allow you to get better, faster. Excel has a mind boggling amount of features, the majority of your time spent learning will be finding out that a solution to your problem already exists , you just didn't know about it. The quicker you learn where you need to go to find a solution, the quicker you'll begin to build your Excel muscle memory.
Structure Overview
You just clicked on the Excel icon and launched the app, what next?
Application Structure
Excel is built like a book or binder, and you'll be using it the same way. When you open an Excel file, you create what is called a Workbook. Think of this workbook as the cover that holds all of your loose pages together in one place, making it easy to organize. These pages are called Worksheets. On each worksheet or "page", you have all of your written information.
Here is a diagram of the basic structure:
Following this structure will allow you to keep your Excel projects structured in a way that makes it easy to navigate and come back to later. This layout also makes it simple to work with, giving you a more organized space to work with.
Within this opened workbook, you can see at the bottom that we are in "Sheet1". As more sheets are added, more tabs will populate along the bottom row. To switch to them, just click them like you would on your internet browser. It's an easy way to separate out a workbook and keep things neat.
Next in line after the worksheets are the blank cells you see in the grid. In order to start filling out your cells, there are various tools and features to help you. Those tools are all found in the Ribbon.
The Excel Ribbon
The ribbon is where almost all of the tools you'll need to create just about anything are found. If you haven't already, check out the explore section of this website (linked here or on the top of the page). Here, I do a deep dive into each section and explain the various features.
The ribbon houses all of your formatting options, charting, review, functions, formulas, most everything that Excel can do can be accessed through these menus. For now, don't get caught up in the specifics, but these are all of the ribbon tabs:
File - View, open, save, and export different workbooks, also lets you access Excel's built in options Home - The main ribbon page. Houses the most commonly used formatting and sorting options Insert - Insert various excel objects, charts, and pictures
Page Layout - Change workbook color, size, view, and print options Formulas - Insert formulas, edit named ranges, and various workbook error checking and proofing features Data - Import, manipulate, and analyze data sets Review - Basic workbook check functions and options that enable better sharing of workbooks View - Change page layout and view modes, mirror workbooks, switch and open multiple windows Developer - Edit and insert macros, userforms and controls, and manage Excel add-ins Draw - Tools to create drawings and mark-ups over the top of worksheets Help - Access to help tools, feedback, training, and Excel community features
Your Workspace
Where you'll actually be doing all of your work and making all of your changes is in a worksheet, on the giant grid of cells you see every time you launch excel.
We'll go into more specifics later, but for now, just try to visualize it as a standard page of a book, with each "word" on the page being a cell. Each cell can have it's own content, own appearance, and can be linked with other cells.
The grid allows you to visually structure your work in a way that is easy to read and make sense.
The cells are arranged by columns that start at A and increase through the alphabet. A -> B - > C -> etc. until Z and then the alphabet loops back through with the next letter in front of it. AA -> AB -> ... -> AY -> AZ -> BA. Excel has a built in limit of 16,384 columns.
The rows are on the left hand side and are simply numbered starting from one in ascending order. 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> etc. Excel has a built in limit of 1,048,576 rows.
The Formula Bar
The bar located right above the cell grid and right below the ribbon, houses a few different things. To the right is the formula bar, this displays the formula or cell contents of the currently selected cell.
See if we enter in the formula =2+2 in cell B2, the formula bar will show us the formula behind the displayed value in the cell.
Directly to the left of that is the "Insert Function" button. Here you can drop in any of Excel's built in functions into your formula. The check and plus buttons will enter in or delete the function you are currently writing.
And finally, to the left of the insert function section, is a small window that displays your currently selected cell or cell range. This will also display the names of the cell or range if you have named it.
Conclusion
And there you have it! The basic layout of Excel. It may be daunting at first, but once you start to use Excel, this will all become second nature. One thing to keep in mind is that Excel throws a lot of stuff in your face all at once with no explanation of how it all works. You can just ignore it for now. Most of these options are here for people who need to access them quickly. If you're just starting out, just worry about the basics.