 Hello, and welcome to the audio guide that will help you work through your spreadsheet assignment. I think it's called Excel Training A. In any event, it's the first assignment. This audio tutorial will help you become familiar with the spreadsheet and how they work and will walk you through a little bit, a little portion of each part of the first Excel assignment. What you see in front of you is a spreadsheet. This particular spreadsheet software that I'm using is Microsoft Excel 2007. There's a number of different kinds of spreadsheet software that you can use. Microsoft Excel is the most popular. But if you don't have Excel on your computer, I believe there's instructions to help you download OpenOffice, which is a free version of a spreadsheet. It looks slightly different. This portion of the worksheet will look very similar than the numbers over here and the letters over here. But this top portion will look different, but it has the same functionality. It's just that the menu buttons will look slightly different. This is a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet consists of cells. You can use your mouse to click between cells. You can also use your arrow keys to click between cells. Particular cells are identified by their row and their column. The row is always a number, and the column is always a letter. The following tutorial is going to work you through the rest of the assignment that you need to do. In order to locate that, and you'll be able to download this assignment and follow along either now or later, the sheets for the assignment are listed down here. You can click them and you can bring up the different assignment pages. I started on a blank sheet just to start with basic familiarity. If you ever are curious about adding additional sheets, you can usually push a button right here that's Insert Worksheet. Click that, a new worksheet will appear. You can drag the order around there as well. Let's begin by looking at the very first exercise, which is called formulas. You click on that formula worksheet and that brings that to the front. This is the basic instructions for how to enter formulas into Excel. I have put here the symbols, the operators, and what they do. I guess before we get there, if you've never used Excel before, I should point out that when you click in a particular cell, you can see what's in that cell right where it is, but also this formula bar up here is a very helpful place to look and see what exactly is in your cell. In order to enter data into a cell, you just click on that cell and start typing. Push Enter to enter the data. If you want to delete the data, just highlight the cell and push Delete. You can type numbers into the cell, etc. I assume that you have some at least very basic familiarity with how a spreadsheet functions. In this exercise, I'm simply asking that you follow the instructions over here for the particular numbers here on the left. For example, I would like you to write a formula in this cell that adds the numbers in column A and B. And how does that work? Well, in Excel, whenever you want to enter a formula, you need to use the equals sign as the first key that you enter. The equals sign tells Excel that what you're about to do is enter a formula that Excel should calculate. So what we'll do is we'll click on the cell that we'd like. We'll type the equals button. And then we will tell Excel which numbers we would like to add. In this case, we'd like to add 47 and 21. So we type equals, then we click on the cell 47. And notice what that does. That tells Excel to look at cell A13, the one that we highlighted. And then we want to add them. So to do addition, we use the plus symbol. So we push plus, and then we click on this cell, and that is cell B13, as you can see right there. So what this formula is doing is it's telling Excel to add whatever's in A13 plus whatever's in B13. In this case, it's 47 and 21. That's the end of the formula. We push enter. What appears? Well, what appears is the solution to the addition problem, 68. And a simple hand math would show you that that is in fact true. Now back to what I was saying earlier, if you click on that cell and you look up at the top, you can see the formula that you entered. Now that's very helpful because all you see down here is the number. But up here, you can see the entire formula. One of the reasons Excel is really powerful is because you can leave this formula here and you can change some of the numbers in these columns and the formula will still work. For example, if we change 47 to 40, just type a new number in there, the formula automatically recalculates and adjusts the new information and the answer is 61. So let's put it back to 47. Now for the rest of the assignment, you should complete and submit to your instructor. You will finish by entering the proper formulas in these cells. One of the ones I want to help you with, and by the way, all the operators are up here. So you add addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raise the power. If you can't find that on your keyboard, that's shift. And the number six most often. But one thing I want to help you with is how Excel recognizes order of operations. If you've done basic math, you should have an understanding of order of operations and the use of parentheses. But let's just do an example to make sure you're getting it. And let's fill in number six. Number six says, raise a plus b to the b power. Well, the first thing we need to do, remember, is to type equals to tell Excel we're entering a formula. And then we need to use a parenthesis. Because first we need to add a plus b, and then we need to raise that entire amount to the b power. In other words, we want to raise four plus two, which is six, to the fourth power. So we type, we click on this cell to add, and we push the plus sign. And then we click on that cell. And then what we do is we close the parenthesis. And then we want to use the power operator, which is shift six. And then we want to click again on this cell, b18. So we have the correct answer, which is raising the a plus b cells to the b cell power. And then we push Enter to finish it, 1,296. Now, if we had what would be an incorrect way, the incorrect way to do this. Let's just delete that so I can show you the incorrect way. It would not be correct to simply type equals two plus four, excuse me, four, which is the b18 cell. And then if you raise that to the four power, that's not correct. 258 is not correct. Why? If we click on it, we can look up here, what that's doing is that's because Excel follows order of operations, it's taking this amount, which is four to the fourth power. It's b18 to the b18 power, whatever's in that cell. And then it's adding a18. So if you need to review basic order of operations, that's something you should review. That's not something that's something we consider a prerequisite for this course. OK, so for the rest of your assignment, you should fill in the rest of these cells. And once you're through with that, you can check them on a regular calculator. That's fine, just to make sure you've done it all properly. Move on to the next sheet by clicking the next sheet. This sheet is designed to introduce you to the concepts of copying and pasting formulas in Excel. And formulas, Excel is very powerful because you usually only need to do something once, and then you can copy it along and get the results. And I'll show you by an example. The instructions say, first, to write a formula in cell b17 that adds the sales from store A. So what it wants is it wants the total sales right there in the total column for store A. And there's two ways that we can do that, the long way and the short way. The long way would be to type the equals sign and then click on each cell inserting a plus in between, like so, and then type in enter, 222. That's the long way, but there's a short way because Excel has a bunch of built-in functions that do special things. The one that you're going to use most often is sum. It's basically telling Excel to add a column of numbers. And so we'll delete this, and we'll show you that function. You type equals, then open parenthesis. I'm sorry. First you type equals, then you type sum, and that's a special code word that tells Excel that you're about to give it a range of reference cells to add. And you need to then use an open parenthesis. Now, this parenthesis has nothing to do with order of operations. It's simply how Excel is expecting to get the information that it needs in order to follow the instructions that you're giving it. And in this case, we type the open parenthesis, and then we highlight the entire range of cells that we like to add. And then we close the parenthesis, and then we push Enter. And it does it for us. It's much faster, especially if you have a very large column of numbers. For example, you could have 1,000 numbers that you're trying to add, and you wouldn't want to individually type equals plus that number, plus that number, plus that number. The sum function is what you want. Again, if you forgot what it is, click on the cell, look up here. It says equals sum, and then open parenthesis. And then what I did is I just used my mouse to highlight the row, the column that I wanted. And then I pushed Enter. Now, here's the copy and paste beauty of Excel. Rather than type again in each of these cells equals sum, open parenthesis, and highlighting the range, Excel can copy and paste formulas, and it does it right. Notice first that we are adding the information in column B. That's this column right here. It's because all this data is in column B. Watch what happens if we simply click on that cell, find where your Excel does a copy and paste. Control C is good for copy. Control V is good for paste as a shortcut. But we can also go up here to copy, or we can right click and find copy there. I'll right click here for you. We're gonna copy it. Then we're gonna click it there, and we're gonna paste it. And watch what happens. It adds the next column of numbers properly. And how does it do that? It's because when you told Excel to copy and paste it and you moved the formula over one space, Excel moved everything over one space. Whatever it had up here, it simply moved it over one space. And that's why now it says C instead of B. This column says B, this column says C. To continue, we can simply copy this again and paste it in there, and we should get the correct answer. Likewise, if we go over here, we can also sum horizontally equals sum open parenthesis and then simply highlight the horizontal row. Type enter. Again, that's correct sum. Again, you can copy and paste this formula. Simply copy. And this time, rather than doing one at a time, I'm just gonna copy the highlights whole area. I'm gonna right click, I'm gonna push paste, and there it is, all the formula moving all the way down. Finally in the last row, it doesn't really matter whether we've copied down or copied to the right, it's going to give us the same answer. We'll just copy this way, paste. And this total should be the total both ways. One thing, one other thing I wanted to point out, pay attention now. When I click on this cell right here, we look up and we see that it's adding this row, and this row is identified by row 12, columns B through D. That's why it says B12 through D12. When we move down, watch what changes. Last time when I showed you, it was the column letter that was changing because we were copying and pasting from left to right. But when we copy and paste from top to bottom, the row number changes. Notice this changes to B13 to D13, B14 to D14. Why did it do that? It's because when you copy and pasted and you moved the formula down one cell, Excel knew to move all the arguments in the formula that the portion and the parentheses down one cell also. So if you copy and paste down, Excel changes it properly so that it moves down. If you move it to the right or left, Excel changes it properly so that it goes to the right or to the left. So you can work on that in your assignment now as well. Moving on to the next. The next tab is teaching you about how to use something called the data table. But I think I'm gonna put that in the second AVI file just so the files don't get too big. So that's coming up in another file.