Microsoft Excel 2011

Excel 2011 is a high powered tool that helps you organize, analyze and evaluate data. Excel is commonly used for various task, such as:

  • Creating budget reports and tracking financial transactions

  • Creating charts or graphs

  • Organizing data in lists

Excel documents consists of workbooks, and within those, worksheets. You can store hundreds of worksheets within a single workbook. The workbook containing sheets is what you save as a .xlsx file. Older versions of Excel save workbook as .xls files, so if you need you workbook to someone with an older version of Excel, make sure that it is in .xls format.

Click here to explore Excel 2011 features


Tour of the Excel 2011 Interface

Before you begin to enter data, you should familiarize yourself with some of the user interfaces that you can use in all workbooks

  1. Menu Bar: The area at the top of the screen where all menus are displayed. The File, Edit, and View menus have the most commonly used menu command
  2. Standard Toolbar: The toolbar that displays the name of the workbook (in this case, Workbook1) and buttons for some of the most common tasks, such as opening, saving, and printing a workbook
  3. Ribbon: The organization of tabbed commands
  4. Tabs: The tabbed command bar at the top of a window or work area that organizes features into logical groups. The Home tab has the most commonly used commands for formatting workbook data
  5. Formula box: The data or formula stored in the active cell
  6. Worksheet: A single page in a workbook. Each workbook can have multiple worksheets, or "sheets."
  7. Cell: The intersection point between a column (A, B, C) and a row (1, 2, 3). Each cell has an address (for example, cell A1 is the intersection point of column A, and row 1). The active cell has a blue highlight around it
  8. Name box: The reference of the active cell (cell reference address)
  9. Windows control buttons:
    • Red button   - close the current workbook without closing the program
    • Orange button  - minimize the current workbook to the Dock
    • Green button    - return the window to the original full screen size
  10. Window resize: The control of the window size by clicking and dragging it until the windows is at a desired size