How to Get Your Life Back on Track
Excel is no longer only for use in the office. It can be used to manage your home finances as well. The basic formulas in Excel are enough to take care of information like your bills, your loan repayments and the amount of credit left on store cards and credit cards. Excel allows you to play around with the data far more easily than a word processor because you can order the data and filter it to get the information you want. Any list you need to make can be made simpler by Excel.
Access to Excel
Excel comes as part of the Microsoft Office package so you'll need to buy a license if you want to use all of Excel's functions. You can purchase the package outright and have one license on your PC or Mac or you can opt for an annual or monthly subscription. It's cheaper to purchase the license outright, but you only get the standard software including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. If you want Publisher or Access, you'll need an annual subscription. There is also an online version that can be accessed for free. It has most of the functionality found with the Office software but you won't be able to create macros and it has no revision support.
The basics of Excel aren't too hard to grasp if you've used any of the other Office programs. When you open Excel you'll see the toolbar at the top as it is in Word. In Excel you access the basic functions of saving, printing and sending in the same way. Before you begin using Excel, you'll need to know some basic terminology. The grids you see on the program are organized into columns that go up and down and rows that go across the page. You can paste into the boxes using the same key combination or mouse click as the other Office programs and you'll find icons for changing the color of letters and other text formatting tools at the top as they are in Word.
Easy Excel Formulas
There are lots of very complicated formulas you can put into Excel that count data across multiple sheets or workbooks, but there are also very simple formulas that can be helpful. The basic Excel formula that most users will need to know involves adding, subtracting, dividing and multiplying data within a cell. To calculate something simple, like five plus five, in a cell press = and then 5+5. When you press enter the cell with show the answer. You'll notice that the keypad doesn't have a ÷ sign when you want to divide. Although there's an x on the keyboard it's not used to multiply. With Excel, you use / to divide and * to multiply.
More Notes for Beginners
Excel allows you to input lots of data and then organize it. You can add filters to a column and then pick out the information in the column that matches a data range or a particular number. That's great when you're looking for similarities between data in a massive spreadsheet because you can filter out everything that's not relevant, but it's also good when you're working on your home finances or your retirement plan using Excel. If you input all of your bills into the spreadsheet, you could filter on bills over or under a set amount.
Sorting Data
You can also sort a column to order your data. Let's say you're looking at your savings which you have in several places. You can sort the column by amount to show where you have the most savings or the least. You could sort the data to show which savings account gives you the best return on your money and which offers the least interest. You'll find this function and the filter tool under the data tab. When you click it you'll get a grey box appear that's very similar to the one you see when you use the find function on Word.
Shortcut Keys
When you get a bit more confident with Excel you can start using the shortcut keys. As you'd imagine from the name, these are the quickest way to access the tools on Excel. Pressing Ctrl and F brings us the Find and Replace function you're probably already familiar with through other Office programs as well as browsers like Microsoft Edge and Chrome. Pressing Ctrl and C copies the cell you're clicked on. You only need to press Ctrl and V to paste that information into another cell.
Advanced Excel
If you want to know all of the advanced features of Excel, you'll need to take an online course. There are lots of different courses offered from various providers so you'll need to do some research before picking one. If you're interested in knowing more but you don't want to pay for a course, you can find Excel training videos on Microsoft's website that will show you how to do things like making charts and running pivot tables.
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How to Get Your Life Back on Track
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