In this section:

If you’ve never used it before, open up Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and take a look. You’ll see a worksheet that contains a seemingly endless grid of columns and rows—16,384 columns and more than a million rows! The space at the intersection of each column and row is a cell, so, although you’ll probably never need them all, you have billions of cells ready to hold whatever types of data you’ll be working with. You can use a single worksheet if that’s all you need, or you can use multiple worksheets for large projects. You can organize several worksheets that all pertain to one set of data into their own workbook. If you work on several large projects, you can give each project its own workbook. When you start a new workbook, you’ll see that it contains three worksheets, but you can add more if you need them.

In this section of the book, you’ll learn how to enter and edit data and how to add visual appeal and clarity to your worksheets by formatting them with fonts, colors, borders, and so on. You can create your own look, or use templates that quickly apply predefined styles to your worksheets or workbooks. You’ll learn how to format numbers in various ways—as currency, percentages, or decimals—for readability. We’ll also show you how to update, change, move, or copy your data, and how to print your worksheets.

What’s Where in Excel?

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 has one purpose—to help you get the most out of your data. Although Excel can display many different appearances and elements, the most common of these are illustrated below.