 My name is Patrick Loner, and I'll be your instructor on this course. We're gonna start with a little bit about my background. I've been in the IT industry actually for about 18 years, working as a network administrator and a Microsoft certified trainer. And of course, a long way, I've done my fair share of applications training as well, and I've also used the Office programs personally, every version, since I think Office 97 was the first version that I was involved with. I heavily use, of course, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, all of those, very well-versed in the differences, the older versions to the new, the compatibility issues, from an IT perspective, but also just using them from an application perspective. So I'm excited to be able to go through these courses and share this information with you and get you ready to use the latest version of Microsoft Office. In this first topic, we're gonna talk about working with ranges. See, when you enter in formulas and you enter in functions, then they're calculating the results from different cells within the worksheet. Sometimes it's one cell and that can be difficult enough, but when I am talking about multiple worksheets and workbooks, it can become very confusing as to how you reference cells in the other worksheets. And so, you know, this is made easier through an ability that Excel provides to create named ranges for use in your functions and formulas. So it provides a way for you to read a formula or function more naturally because the names are based on existing titles, what I've actually called the worksheet. This will make it much easier. So a cell name or a range name, they really are exactly what they sound like. Instead of using cell references like E2 times F2, I set up a formula using a name. Number of books sold times cell price. It's a more logical name to me and it makes it easier to reference those that particular range of cells. It's still the same thing. It's still a range of cells, but I'm able to reference it by name. And think of how much more meaningful that is if you just wait three weeks and open up the workbook again. And now, if it's E2 times F2, I've got to go figure out what in the world is in E2 and F2. Now, thankfully they're right next to one another, but you see the point. And instead of that, I can just see this formula. And it's possible that that formula is actually on another worksheet too. And so you prevent yourself from having to go back over to that worksheet. So all these are concise descriptive names that you can assign to cells or ranges for the purpose of making things easier. Now, there are some rules that you need to keep in mind. The names do need to begin with a letter, an underscore or a backslash. Those are the only options, no numbers. That's rule number one. After the first character, they can contain letters, numbers, periods and underscores. They cannot contain spaces. So instead of spaces, we typically use the underscore and the names have to be unique, okay? So follow those, but still use intuitive names. I mean, technically they can be up to 255 characters, but who needs to do that? Just stick with some consistent standard. So if you want to use spaces and the actual column names, fine. Others will just put it all together, okay? Now do realize that it's not recognizing casing, okay? So you can use casing and reference it that way, but you can't use casing to try to make unique values. There are a lot of different methods to create names. The most direct of them is this name box that we see here. So we select a cell or range and then we go up to the name box and we type in the name. We can choose a name, but those would be names that already existed. So we would be typing in a name and that actually creates it. Another way to name cells or ranges is using the new name dialogue box. Here you have a little bit better control over specifically what the name refers to. So to get here, we have to go to the formula tab and then there's a defined names option. We click define name and we get this dialogue box. It's kind of bad when we're two, three levels deep before we show you the dialogue box, but here we just, you specify the name, you specify the scope and then it refers to and it refers to is the name reference. Whatever cell or range of cells was selected when you open the dialogue box, that's what's going to be displayed as an absolute reference, but we can make changes to that if we want. So the easiest way is select it and then either name it or open up the new name dialogue box. Another option that we have to name ranges is the create from selection command. This is a good one because you can quickly and easily create a single range name or multiple range names at once based on what you have currently selected. So you simply select the range and then you access the create name from selection command, which is available in that same defined names group. So it opens up this dialogue box and then you can create names from values in the top row and the left column and it will by default name your range for you and the scope for that is going to be workbook. And I'm not sure if we mentioned it before, but with the scopes and the unique names, or with the unique names, I should say the unique name has to be within the scope. So this is great because it's quick. It's also got a keyboard shortcut, but it doesn't give you quite as much flexibility on the naming. A lot of workbooks are gonna be pretty dynamic. That means worksheets are changing and so it stands to reason that you probably will have to go back in and edit things. So you can change the names of name cells. You can change ranges. So we've talked about the ability to insert and delete rows and columns. Well, that would cause these ranges to be slightly off. So you have a name manager dialogue box, which is what we're looking at here. And you can use this to rename, to edit, to delete existing defined names. And you can use it to access the new name. There's a new button there, which will open up and give you the ability to create new names. There's also a filter. Top right, the filter command you can use to filter the display of the existing name. So for instance, you have scope, you have values, you have names. So I can sort, I can filter by workbook or worksheet. You're gonna have a lot of options there with the filter section of the name manager. Now it's helpful to be able to name cells or ranges of cells. And that's good for navigation. However, the real power in this is the ability to easily identify references and ranges within formulas. And so instead of specifying, we can see it here, equals some mullins. So if we have a name range called mullins, then instead of having to specify the cells in that range, I can easily insert those in formulas. There's also a ribbon command that you can use to insert cells and range names into formulas and functions. It is aptly named. And right next to name manager, by the way, the use in formula command. So this isn't gonna be in that define names group as well. You can just select a range and then say, or excuse me, you can be typing the formula in and use in formula and then you just specify your ranges. Okay, so it's going to just list out any name ranges that have already been created. The formula autocomplete method can help you enter functions into a worksheet. Nice thing it does is it prevents me from having to type in the whole name of the function. As you can see here, it's also going to autocomplete named ranges. So when you are utilizing the worksheet view or, or I'm sorry, when you're editing in in the worksheet or you're using the formula bar, as you start to type the range of the name, then IntelliSense pops up and so then you can just hit enter to quickly and easily include those in your functions. And that's it. So this is it. Thanks very much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I will see you in the next one. Bye bye.