Create and Save Your First Spreadsheet While we'll be using Excel 2000 as an example, the following applies to other spreadsheet programs as well, including Lotus and the spreadsheet module of Microsoft Works. With Excel 2000, creating simple workbooks to record and calculate data is a surprisingly intuitive process. Follow these steps to learn the basics of creating, saving, and printing a workbook. Open Excel 2000 from the Start menu by selecting Programs/Microsoft Excel. When you load Excel 2000, the program automatically opens a new workbook that contains a number of worksheets called Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3, and so on. You can browse these blank sheets by clicking the tabs at the bottom of the Excel window. Sheet1 is the selected sheet. It's divided into alphabetical columns and numerical rows. The intersection of a column and a row is called a cell; each cell is referred to by its column letter and row number. So the top-left cell is A1, and the cell at the intersection of column H and row 8 is H8. Click in cell H8, type your name, and press Enter. Then click in cell B3, type your name again, and press Enter. Click in cell B4, type the number 100, and press Enter. You now have something to save and print in the next steps. In the next few steps you'll be using the New, Open, Save, and Print buttons on your Standard toolbar, so take a minute to locate them. If you hold your mouse over a button, a tool tip displaying its name will appear. Note: you can also find these commands in the File menu. Save your file by clicking the Save button (or selecting File/Save). The Save As dialog box appears. The drop-down box labeled "Save in" shows the folder in which Excel is suggesting you save your file (usually the My Documents folder). The drop-down box labeled "File name" shows the name Excel is suggesting you use to call your file--generally something like Book1.xls. Change the filename to My first workbook and click Save. To print your file, click the Print button (the icon on your toolbar that looks like a printer), or select File/Print from the menu. To close your file, open the File menu and select Close. If you made changes to your file after you saved it, Excel asks if you want to save the changes you made to your workbook. To save your changes, click the Yes button; if you want to permanently discard the changes you made after you first saved, click the No button. You will be left with a clear screen. To create another workbook, click the New button (or select File/New and click OK). When you save this new workbook, give it a different name from the previous workbook--for example, My second workbook. (If you give a file the same name as another file in the same folder, you'll overwrite the first one, so each workbook must have a unique name.) You have now created, printed, saved, and closed a workbook. If you need to make further changes to your workbook or print it again, you'll need to open it. To do this, select the Open button, click the workbook's filename in the My Documents folder list, and select Open. You can now print the file or make changes to it. Note: Whenever you make changes to a file, be sure to save them by clicking the Save button (you won't see the dialog asking you for a filename this time because your file already has a name). |
