Introduction

Welcome to the world of Excel. Okay, that’s a bit cheesy. But if you look around the business world, the financial world, the manufacturing world, and any other industry you can of, you will see people using Excel. Excel is everywhere. It is by far the most used program in the history of business applications. So in a very real way, it is truly a world of Excel. This is probably why you’ve picked up this book. You need a way to accelerate your learning and get up to speed in Excel.

Well, worry not, dear reader. Whether you’re boning up on Excel for a new job (congratulations, by the way), a school project, or just for home use, this book is perfect for you. Easy Microsoft Office Excel 2010 provides concise, visual, step-by-step instructions for the most common tasks you need to do in Excel. You won’t be inundated with fancy descriptions of every little function and feature. We get right to the core tasks you need to get started fast. You learn how to create, edit, format, and print worksheets, as well as how to create charts and use Excel formulas. Just about everything you need to get up and running with Excel is in this one easy book.

What’s In This Book

First, you will explore the user interface. You’ll get a sense of where to choose tasks, where to enter information, and how to move around in Excel. From there, you’ll learn how to manage your Excel files. This includes creating new Excel workbooks, saving workbooks, and moving worksheets between workbooks.

Next, you’ll explore the various methods for getting data into Excel. You will also walk through some techniques that allow you to manage and more easily work with the data in your Excel worksheets.

You’ll continue on with the topic of formatting data. Here, you’ll learn how to make your workbook your own by adding colors and applying fonts. You’ll also learn how to make your data more readable by applying number formatting and cell formatting.

After you’ve covered the basics, you’ll get a solid introduction to Excel functions and formulas. You’ll first learn how to create and implement your own formulas. Then you’ll get tutorials on how to use the most commonly used Excel functions.

Next, you’ll explore charting in Excel. Here, you’ll get an understanding of how to create charts in Excel and how to customize them to fit your needs. From there, you’ll continue on to discover some of the ways you can add graphics and other visualizations into your Excel worksheets.

We’ll round out your introduction to Excel with the topic of printing. Although printing sounds trivial, you’ll discover that there are many print options you can use to configure your workbooks to print properly.

Finally, for those of you preparing yourself for a corporate job, Chapter 9, “Working with Excel Pivot Tables,” introduces you to the topic of Pivot Tables. One of the most useful features in Excel, pivot tables allow any Excel analyst to analyze large amounts of data with just a few clicks.

After going through all the topics covered in this book, you will be able to say that you know how to use Excel!