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Excel tutorial

Learn the basics of Excel quickly

This Excel tutorial is part of our learning time management skills series.  After reading this tutorial you should be able to use Excel for simple tasks.

Excel is an excellent spreadsheet program provided by Microsoft.  A spreadsheet program enables you to perform calculations on groups of related data and to sort the resultant data.

This tutorial is designed for people who want to understand the basics of Excel.  You’ll learn how to use the program to perform simple calculations and how to use these calculations in a simple example. 

We’re going to work with an imaginary shop that sells CDs and DVDs.  The shop doesn’t sell very many of them but the owner is keen to find out how sales are doing.  Traditionally the owner might have drawn up a table using pen and paper it might have looked something like this:

This is probably sufficient when the owner is only selling two CD’s.  Our owner has decided that they want to start to sell DVDs in addition to CDs to boost sales.  Now the owner will need a table for CDs and a table for DVDs. 

If the owner starts to have large numbers of CDs and DVD then they might find managing the data difficult.  So our owner has decided on a spreadsheet to help him.

I’ve included a download of the excel spreadsheet I’ll use in this tutorial which you can download by clicking on this Excel tutorial link.

I’ll assume that you can load up the excel file.  If you haven’t done this before it’s quite simple.  Open up excel and then click on the menu item File in the top left hand corner, a drop down box will appear.  Next click Open, if Open isn’t visible then click on the small double arrow at the bottom of the box.  This will expand the box and Open will be visible.  Find the excel file you’ve downloaded and open it. 

You should have a screen similar to the one above.  You can see that I’ve already populated it with some data from our shop. 

Spreadsheets are arranged in rows and columns.  These are shown in Excel as A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 etc.  Where they intersect is known as a cell.  To check you understand how to reference the rows and columns find the value in cell D8. 

You should have found the number 50.

In the spreadsheet I’ve repeated the hand drawn table but now I’ve put one value in each cell.  CD 1 sold £120 in January and so cell D7 has 120 entered into it.  I’ve continued this for all of the CDs and then added new data for the DVDs.

At the bottom of the CD’s table I’ve put in a Total sold row.  Unlike the hand drawn table this value is automatically calculated.  If you click on cell D9 you’ll find that it doesn’t contain the value 170 but it says “=SUM(D7:D8)”.

Cell D9 contains a formula.  This is when you might be thinking that this Excel tutorial is going to get difficult but don’t worry.  The formula is pretty straightforward.

If I rewrite this formula in plain English it should make more sense ( I’ll do this for all the formula in this Excel tutorial):

The “=” sign tells the Excel program that what follows is a formula and should be treated as such.  Then the word “SUM” tells Excel to add the numbers that are in the following brackets together.  The cells in the bracket tell Excel which cells to add.

Although it’s not needed for this Excel tutorial it’s also worth considering the other ways this formula could have been written.  You could also have put in the cell “=D7 +D8”

The reason I used “SUM” in this Excel tutorial, is it allows you to cover multiple cells. 

You can see this demonstrate in cell D15 of this Excel tutorial.  The value of the cell is “=SUM(D12:D14)”.  If this was written using the other method you’d need to write “= D12 + D13 + D14”.  This wouldn’t be too much for three cells.  But if our owner had 100 DVDs and 300 CDs it would be a bit of a problem.  It would take our owner a long time to type in all the cells and the “plus” signs.

I’ve used the same formulas throughout the spreadsheet.  You can see that with only these simple formulas you can create a powerful reporting tool.  For example in cell J33 I have created a “SUM” that shows the total profit. 

To create this I’ve added together all the sales in cell D27 and all the costs in cell D31.  I’ve then subtracted the costs from the sales in cell D33 using “=D27 – D31”.  This time instead of adding the values in the cells it subtracts them.  I’ve then “SUM” the totals cells together in J33.

Notice that J33 the “SUM” formula works by adding together the columns.  Before we added rows with “= D12 + D13 + D14” where the number changes by the column “D” stays constant.  This time the column changes and the row stay constant.  So the equivalent would be: “=D33 + E33 + F33 + G33+ H33 + I33”.

Before finishing this Excel tutorial there is one more formula worth explaining.  This is the formula in D19.  This is slightly more complicated that the other formula, “=(D9/10)*D18”.

The “/” means divided by and the “*” means multiply be.  So the formula is divide the value in D9 by ten and then multiply the result by the value in cell D18.  So I’ve divided the number sold, “D9” by 10.  I’ve done this since I’m assuming that 10 is the cost of a CD.  The value I create is therefore the number of CDs sold.  I then multiply the number of CDs sold by “D18” the cost per CD to get the total cost of CDs.

I hope you found this Excel tutorial useful.  If you’ve any thoughts or comments I’d love to hear from you at learning@projecthuddle.com.