If you’re familiar with the way a program such as Microsoft Office Word works, your first reaction to Excel’s idiosyncratic behavior might be "Huh?" or "What happened?" To become comfortable with Excel, you need to understand that it’s a completely different creature from Word. It behaves differently because it’s designed for the organization and analysis of data.

Excel is made up of vertical columns and horizontal rows. At the intersection of a column and a row is a cell. This grid structure is designed to help you organize your data. Look at the worksheet below, and you’ll see that all the items in column A are related—that is, each cell contains the name of a student. Similarly, all the items in columns B, C, and D are related—they represent scores for different tests. The items in each row are related too. All the items in row 2 are related to each other—that is, each is about Robert’s exam scores. So, at the intersection of a column and a row is a single piece of data—a data point. At the intersection of column C and row 2 is the data point indicating that in Test 2 (column C), Robert (row 2) scored 77. In Excel’s cell notation—its short-hand language—this data point is located in cell C2.

Keep in mind that Excel is all about data. Unlike Word, it cares little about presentation. You can, with a little work, make a fine-looking presentation in Excel, but Excel might occasionally stymie you because its priority is to preserve the integrity of the data when it’s being edited. This means that if you click in a cell and start typing, you’ll be replacing the existing data rather than adding to it. Why? Because, to Excel, each cell contains that single piece of data. When you click in a cell that contains data, Excel thinks that you want to either update or correct the data. This can definitely throw you off when you’re used to the normal Office protocol of selecting something before you change it! You’ll see the same thing when you copy or move columns, rows, or cells. Unlike Word, for example, Excel doesn’t automatically add columns or rows to a table to compensate for your actions—you have to manage the columns, rows, and cells yourself.

It might take you a little while to get used to Excel’s differences, but, as you start crunching your data, you’ll find that what seems like Excel’s quirky behavior actually helps you get accurate results very efficiently. Of course, Excel does have many other complexities, such as using relative or absolute references to cells, and building complex formulas that contain sophisticated functions. However, these features really are designed to make working with your data as precise and accurate as possible. We’ll go into detail about cell references, formulas, and functions in "Cell References, Formulas, and Functions".