Excel - Excel Overview

Microsoft Excel - Excel Basics

Part 1 - Excel Overview

What is Excel?

Excel is a spreadsheet program in the Microsoft Office system. You can use Excel to create and format workbooks (a collection of spreadsheets) in order to analyze data and make more informed business decisions. Specifically, you can use Excel to track data, build models for analyzing data, write formulas to perform calculations on that data, pivot the data in numerous ways, and present data in a variety of professional looking charts.
Due to its extreme versatility and power, Excel has become one of the most-used software programs in the business world since its launch in 1985. Indeed, the personal computing renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s was largely driven by the many uses of Excel and other spreadsheet software.


By default, documents saved in Excel are saved with the .xlsx extension whereas the file extension of the prior Excel versions are .xls.

What is Excel used for?

That's all well and good, but what are spreadsheets used for? Almost everything. Spreadsheets are extraordinarily powerful tools, and are used frequently in the business world to store and manipulate data.

Audience

This tutorial has been designed for computer users who would like to learn Microsoft Excel in easy and simple steps. It will be highly useful for those learners who do not have prior exposure to Microsoft applications.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of Computer peripherals like mouse, keyboard, monitor, screen etc. and their basic operations. You should also have the basic skills of file management and folder navigations.