Navigating in Excel
Navigating in Excel simply means working and moving around in the spreadsheet. Excel users need to be comfortable with the various parts of the spreadsheet, the different mouse pointers and what they do. The next step is to start building your spreadsheet! There are many different ways an Excel spreadsheet can improve your productivity, create a visual representation of your data and offer an easy way to manipulate at data. Here are some examples:
Manage a List of Data
- Sort
- Filter
- Remove duplicate entries
Basic Math Functions
- Add
- Subtract
- Multiply
- Divide
Add a Visual Element
- Bar Chart
- Pie Chart
- Pivot Table
The ideas above barely scratch the surface of the helpful things Excel can do! Hopefully, they give you some motivation to learn how to Navigate in Excel. Let’s start by selecting rows, columns, a cell and a range.
Selecting Columns and Rows
You must make sure that your mouse pointer is pointing at the column or row header. It will look like a down-pointing, or right-pointing black arrow. Here’s a video to help out navigating in Excel!
Selecting a Cell
Selecting a cell uses the the white plus-sign pointer. Point and click at several places in a worksheet to see the cell become “active”. The dark border around the cell is your visual telling you which cell is selected. You have other visual helpers, like the column and row headers – they turn yellow. Also, the Name Box will display the name of the cell (shown with a purple circle around it in the image below). Did you know that every cell has a name? The name is the combination of the column and row – so the cell name is the intersection of the column and row. In the example below, I have selected the cell – C6.
Selecting a Range of Cells
Oftentimes you will need to work with more than one cell a a time. You will need to select several cells together – this is called a range. You can select multiple rows, columns and cells – they are all called a range, respectively. Once you have a range selected, you can format them or delete them or manipulate them all at the same time. Work faster, not harder when navigating in Excel 😛
Selecting Non-Contiguous Rows, Columns, Cells and Ranges
One more skill before I wrap up! This is helpful if you want to chose areas that are not next to one another, i.e. Columns C and F (but you don’t want to work with Columns D and E). Take a look at the video to get a few example of what a non-contiguous range would look like. To select a non-contiguous areas, you select the first range, then use the CTRL key and drag to select the second range. Let me break the actions into 2 steps. First step, you select the initial area (cell, row, column or range of those areas). Then for the second step, you hold down the CTRL key and select the next area (cell, row, column or range of those areas). Then release both the mouse and CTRL key. Happy Selecting!
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