One of the real strengths of Microsoft Excel is that the program makes it easy for you to enter large quantities of data with ease. When you type text, Excel remembers what you’ve entered in previous cells in the same column and offers to complete the current entry for you. The good news is that you’ll only need to type "Arkadelphia" once. After the first time, typing the first three letters gives Excel enough information to guess the city name. Entering a series of numbers, dates, or days also goes quickly and smoothly. If you want to enter a long series of numbers, dates, or even weekdays, you can type one or two values and have Excel fill in the remaining values in the series! These techniques, combined with formatting and other skills you’ll encounter elsewhere in this book, make data entry nearly painless.
Excel makes it easy for you to enter data into a worksheet by guessing the type of data you’re entering and applying the appropriate formatting to that data. It’s important to remember that because Excel is a computer program, it has some limitations. For example, Excel performs calculations using decimal values, such as .5, rather than using fractions, such as ½; however, if you do want to express some of your data as fractions and not as decimal values, you can do so by changing the cell’s format to Fraction. In either case, you will be able to save the data in your preferred format.
Another aspect of this bias toward decimal values is that entering dates and times is much easier than it would be if you had to type out a full date, such as February 3, 2007. For example, if you type 2/3 in a cell and press Enter, Excel will recognize the text as an abbreviation for the third day of the month of February and will display the data as 3-Feb.
You can choose the format you want for dates and times by selecting the cells that will hold dates or times, clicking the Home tab on the ribbon, and then clicking the Font dialog box launcher to display the Format Cells dialog box. Inside the dialog box, click the Number tab and then click Date in the list of categories. The available date formats will appear on the right. From there, just click the format you want and click OK. If you want the data in a cell to appear as a fraction, click the Number tab, click the Fraction category, specify the type of fraction on the right, and click OK. The following figure shows the Number tab with the Fraction category selected.
