Microsoft Excel 2016 Tutorial - Getting Started and User Interface

After Office 2003, Microsoft has
entirely changed the user interface in the newer versions, especially in Office
2013 and Office 2016. The new Ribbon interface is entirely redesigned according
to user requirements.

For instance, if you are working on a smaller
screen, and need more space on your screen while entering the data, then you
can temporarily hide the ribbon. Like, if Home is currently the selected menu,
then double click the Home tab, and the entire ribbon interface will
temporarily hide. If you need to use a command from any of the menu, then click
the menu, and then click the corresponding command button, and as soon as you
will click inside the worksheet or document, it will again automatically hide.
If you need to fix the ribbon again permanently, as it was before, then just
double click on the selected menu name. So this feature comes to handy, when
working on small screen devices, like Mobiles or Tablets.

One more thing that you may have
notice from previous versions that, many of the unnecessary menu commands and
toolbars has been removed, and they only appear when you select a certain set
of data. Like, if I select the following picture, only then the Format menu
will appear in the Ribbon, which also will only have pictures related commands,
and this applies to many other contents like, if I select a Chart from the
worksheet, then you will see Design and Format menu in the ribbon, and if you
are working inside a table in a Word Document, then you will have a Design and
Layout menu in the Ribbon. So this makes it easy to find the corresponding
commands easily, instead of searching them in different menus.

Above the Ribbon, you will find a
toolbar with a few default buttons like Save, Undo and Redo. It is called the
Quick Access Toolbar. If you remembered, that in older versions of Office, the
most useful commands were available in Toolbars only, like Standard Toolbar,
Formatting Toolbar and Drawing Toolbar, and for rest of the commands, there
were separate menus like, File, Edit, Format and so on. Now with new interface,
you only have one toolbar by default, which is Quick Access. However, you can
customize this toolbar and can add or remove most used commands. To do this,
click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar drop down button, and make a check
mark on most used commands like, New, Open and Print Preview. You can also add
any of Microsoft Excel command in Quick Access Toolbar, by clicking on More
Commands. Here you can search for your favorite commands either in Popular
Commands list or, you can add commands from any of Excel’s menu tabs. Select a
command and click the Add button. You can also remove any command from the
Quick Access Toolbar, by selecting the command from the right side pane, and
then click Remove. Once you are done adding or removing commands, click the OK
button to save the changes. You can also place the Quick Access Toolbar either
on the top of the Ribbon, or below the Ribbon. You can also customize the Quick
Access Toolbar using the same method, for other Office applications like
Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

In Excel, then you have the Formula
bar below the Ribbon. The Formula Bar not only relates to Excel Formulas, but
it also has comprehensive meaning as well. For instance, in this worksheet the
current active cell is E4, and you can see the same in the Name Box alongside
the Formula Bar. If I type something in here, you can also see the same
contents in the Formula Bar as well. So Formula Bar represents the value of the
Active Cell. Like, if I select any other cell either from the mouse or, using
arrow keys from the key board, you can see the active cell contents on the
Formula Bar as well. But if I move the cursor to the cell which consist
formula, like in this worksheet I move the cursor to the cell E16, which has a value
of 37015. But what here important to look at is the cell E16 showing you the
value, whereas in the Formula Bar, Excel indicates that values are coming out
from a formula. So it is important for you to keep an eye on the active cell
that either it is a value, or it is a result from a formula. More importantly,
if you don’t see a Formula Bar below the Ribbon, then make sure to check
Formula Bar option from the View menu.
The Excel files are called Workbooks,
and an Excel workbook could consist of one or more worksheets. In Excel 2013
and 2016, by default there is only one worksheet for every new file or workbook
that you create. Each Microsoft Excel worksheet consists of Columns and Rows.
The alphabet letters, A, B, C, and so on, represents the column headings,
whereas the left side numbers represent the Row number. These column letters
and row numbers are used to identify the cells, are called cell references. For
instance, the current selected cell in this worksheet is E16, and how you can
identify this, is by seeing the column heading, which in this case is E, and
the row number, which is for now is 16. If you also check the formula of the
active cell, then you can see that I am using Cell References in the formula,
not the values. As the current formula depicts the sum of the values of other
three cells from the same worksheet, but instead of typing the values in
formula, I used their cell references. This is because, if later I change the
value of any given cells, then the result in the cell E16 will automatically be
updated, because I have not assigned a fixed value in the formula, instead I
command Excel to always pick the updated values directly from the given cells,
so if the values get updated in those cells, then the output in the current
formula cell will also be updated. 

You can add more worksheets to your
current Excel workbook by clicking the plus sign alongside the sheet names.
Creating separate worksheets in the same workbook or file helps you to work
more efficiently, when you are working on a project and needs to create several
reports on separate pages. So, instead of creating separate files for the
different reports for the same project, you can add additional worksheets in
the same workbook.
At the very bottom of the worksheet,
below the Worksheet tabs, you have the Status Bar. The Status Bar which is
already having a default indicator of “Ready”, shows you different indicators
as you work with your worksheet. For instance, as I select the values from the
column E, you can see that Excel is quickly showing the Average, Sum, Minimum
and Maximum values from the selected cells. This really comes to handy, when
you don’t want to type a formula but just want to have an assumption of the
selected values. You can also customize the Status Bar and can configure that,
what you want to see, and what not. To do this, right click on an empty area of
the Status Bar, and there you have a list of things that you can enable or
disable. Like, you might want to count the numbers of selected values, then you
can make a check mark on Count, or if you would like to see the Status of
Toggle Keys like Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock, then you can make a check
mark on them respectively, and the indicators for those keys will appear right
in the Status Bar.
So this was a quick overview about
Microsoft Excel interface.




Comments