Excel is an incredibly powerful tool. It's not the market leader for nothing. Maybe some features could be better handled in other applications, but don't let anyone tell you Excel is 'mickey mouse' or 'fisher price' coz it sure ain't.
I found a love of numbers and maths through Excel. I found it so easy after understanding how Excel worked, and was a fundamental reason I resolved to teach numeracy to adults.
Oh, doesn't Excel love its silly terminology. That's because it's a real package, not a pretend one; one where you can do simple - but highly effective - programming. I've found it of great benefit to learners to introduce them to these words as quickly as possible, so that when they find them referred to in the Help files they can actually understand what they mean - and therefore get help.
| Absolute | See the formula section for fuller information |
| Active cell | This is the one with the big thick black border around it. When you start typing, this is where your text would end up. |
| Argument | The part of a function that comes between the brackets. Multiple arguments are separated by a comma. |
| Autofill | The feature that enables you to complete a range of cells automatically. You access it from the bottom right-hand corner of your active cell: when your cursor turns into a small plus, click and hold and drag down or across as needed. Tip: if you have a column of data immediately to the left, double-clicking on the Autofill cursor will automatically fill to the same row down as the column to the left. |
| Autofit | The feature that enables you to resize your columns or rows automatically. To do this, double click on the 'resize arrow' cursor. |
| Autocomplete | If the first few characters that you type in a cell match an existing entry in your column, Excel automatically enters the remaining characters for you. It does this only for those entries that contain text or a combination of text and numbers. You can either press [Enter] to accept the Autocomplete, or carry on typing to ignore it. |
| Cell reference | The name of a cell - e.g. N4. Also called 'Cell Name' or 'Cell Address'. |
| Contiguous/non-contiguous data | All 'contiguous' means is 'joined up' or 'stuck together' or 'adjacent', such as B1 and B2. Non-contiguous therefore means that it's not next to, such as cells B1 and K32. |
| Function | This is a particular type of formula, with a pre-defined purpose - they can be specifically for dealing with time or dates, statistics, engineering, text and so on. They are fantastically helpful. |
| Logical | In computing and Excel terminology, a 'logical' statement has two possible states - known as true or false. For instance, 'The number in cell A1 equals 10' is logical, because whatever's in A1 either is ten (the statement is true), or it isn't (the statement is false). You can't have grey areas in logical statements, something either is, or it isn't. |
| Range | A group of contiguous cells. |
| Syntax | The entirety of a formula. The syntax must be accurate (in particular when you're writing Functions) because otherwise Excel won't be able to work out what you want it to do. |
| Tab | Alternative name for worksheet. |
| Value | Something that you actually see in a cell - this is the easiest way I've found of explaining it - and can be text, numeric, or the answer to a formula. |
| Workbook | A complete spreadsheet file, containing one or several worksheets. |
| Worksheet | An individual 'page' of a workbook - sometimes referred to as a 'tab' as you can move between the different worksheets by clicking on the tab name (defaults to 'Sheet1', 'Sheet2' etc) down at the bottom of the screen. |
| $ in a formula | This fixes or anchors the cell reference - see Absolute. |
| " in a formula | " always surrounds text. Bear in mind that Excel is programmed to deal with numbers, and the only text in a formula it understands is the name of functions. So if you don't surround your text with double-quotes, it'll think you're talking about a function and kick up the #NAME? error. |
| * | Excel's symbol for multiplying |
| / | Excel's symbol for dividing |
| Σ | The toolbar button to access Autosum and the basic functions. |
| & in a formula | & is used to join text strings and formulae together; for instance ="The answer is "&SUM(A1:A2) joins the SUM function with some preceding text. Note that I've only put spaces in the quoted text. |
| ^ in a formula | Excel's symbol for 'to the power of'. |
| > or >= | greater than, or greater than and equal to |
| < or <= | less than, or less than and equal to |
| *** to be continued as things occur to me *** |