Take a Tour of the Excel Dashboard - How to Use the Tabs and Ribbon

OK in this lecture I'm just going to give you a tour of Excel. We're going to cover various dashboards general navigation tips including how to use the Excel ribbon how you use the various towns in Excel and just where to find various things in Excel. So once you've opened Excel once and you've used it when you click on the Excel icon and open it it will bring you to this screen and this screen basically gives you the option to open up a recently used document to open a blank workbook. Here to take one of the various educational tours of excels newer features like stock analysis. My cash flow or the overall Excel tour or you can go into any of these templates and if you scroll down you'll see a lot of templates if you want to find other templates you can go up here and you can search for a template or you can even go into different categories of template. In fact I'll show you if I click on that it's going to take me into all of the business category and even breaks the categories down to show you how many templates there are for various subcategories. So I'm not going to open a template so I'm going to go ahead and just use this back arrow here and I'm going to open up a blank workbook. Now once you've opened a blank workbook if you click on the File tab it's going to take you back to a navigational dashboard that allows you to do a lot of things here on the left so you can click on info that will give you info about your specific workbook. You can go to new and that'll take you back to this familiar place where you can open a new blank workbook or go into templates. You can click on open and that's going to bring you back into your recently opened Excel documents or it will also give you the options to find something on your computer or online. You have a save option shows you the same places where you can save it and save as is the same thing. First you have to pick where you want to save it to. You have a print option where you can lay out your print settings. You have a share option where you can save your work to the cloud and share it with people. E-mail it to people and so on. We have an export where you can save it as a PDA or an XP document publish where you can send things to power Vi. You can close the workbook or close Excel. You can go to your account which gives you just details on your specific products and whatnot. And then you have the options tab and the options tab is very important. And I hope that you'll remember where it is. In fact I'm going to close this and we're going to go back to where I was and show you that again. So it's at the bottom of this list options and when you click it it's going to go into your worksheet and it's going to bring up this dialog box and you may never use this. But if you do want it or need it this is where to find it. And it just has a ton of things. For all of your kind of customizing within Excel so you can do general customizing you can customize how formulas behave proofing how it saves how frequently auto recovery saves your work and things like that. Languages all sorts of advanced options they can customize. Here's a really important one you can customize the ribbon so you can basically change and show you what I mean. This appears the ribbon. And so you can change what is up here so that it fits your needs in your working style specifically. And I will tell you if you're new to Excel I recommend not doing any changes to this until you're more familiar with Excel and you start to get a sense of kind of your work patterns and your work needs. And then at that point you can come back in and customize it to really see your needs and just make your work more efficient. But that's where that is. Basically just click on things and add them to customize it give you a quick access toolbar which you can also customize. You can find and manage different add ins for Excel. And then this is just a security center for Excel. So those are the Excel options. And again that's at the bottom of this tab. From this dash word you can then just click the back arrow button and it'll take you back to your Excel worksheet. So that's kind of the one aspect that's kind of how you get started opening and saving and managing your Excel files. Now let me give you a little tour of the actual Excel dashboard and we'll just kind of show you where everything is. So we already discovered that file will take you back to that other dashboard where you manage your files. That's the only tab that will take you somewhere else like that. All of these other tabs will keep you right in Excel. They'll just change this ribbon. And this is called the ribbon. This is where all of your tools are. I shouldn't say all of your tools but many of your tools will be found here. So your homescreen you have a lot of formatting. Copy paste a lot of text and font formatting and alignment here. Number formatting some cool things like conditional formatting tables and so on and so forth. That's your home tab and your insert tab is where you can basically insert tables pivot tables pictures add ins. This is where you do charts. This is where we'll create the 3D map spark lines which are mini charts that go with in a single cell and various filters and so on page layout is just so sound so you could change themes your page set up the scale of your page. You can do things like take your headings away or bring them back. Get rid of your grid lines or bring back and so on and so forth formulas which we'll be using in the formula sections of this course. You can insert a function here you can choose from various dropdown for functions and a whole bunch of other things for managing your formulas. Data is where you can get external data to import into your spreadsheets in these two areas. You can refresh tables and charts using this. You can sort and filter your data here. These are some more essentially sorting tools and then forecasting and we'll get into how to create a forecast using the forecast sheet which is a new feature which is kind of fun reviewing just is a lot of things that you can do to proof your work and comments. And this is an important section if you are working with worksheets with other people and you need to be careful about them messing up your data or deleting or modifying your data in bad ways. You can protect your work this way. We have a view and this is just a again basically the lay out and you can see this gives us the options here again to take away good lines headings etc. and then developer is where you can go in and actually create macros and use Visual Basic find add ins and so on and so forth. And the last thing on the bar here is TELL ME WHAT TO DO search function and I'll go into that in another lecture. But that's kind of like just the new Excel help. So that's a basic tour of your tabs and your ribbon and you can see there's a ton of information and tools available on that. Don't be overwhelmed. If none of that makes sense or very little that makes sense that's OK. I'd really just wanted to give you an overview of where everything is will go into a number of those things so you'll have a much better familiarity with the toolbars and the ribbons. And we're just going to go back to the hometown because that's where you're going to spend a fair amount of time and then a couple of other quick things if you need to have more space down here you need to see more of your spreadsheet. You can actually close this ribbon by clicking on this arrow but before you do that. Make sure you remember how to open it back up. And the way to open it back up is right here. You would think it would give you a little dropdown arrow but it doesn't this arrow is just to expand the formula bar. You would think it would give you a drop down arrow to bring the ribbon back but it doesn't. So you have to go up to here actually to your ribbon display options and click that and then go down to show tabs and commands and click. Now you can go to there and you can hide everything and then you have to go back to it sneaks over here a little bit and you can show everything again. And then there are the obvious controls like minimize maximize. Close if you hit close it'll prompt you to save your work and you can make an informed decision as to whether you need to save it before you close it. You have the save option here which I like to use frequently so don't lose any data undo redo. And this is a way you can customize your Quick Access Toolbar so you can just click on any of these. For instance if I click on new It'll give me the option to start a new workbook. Right from here and I can click that and it'll go away but you could add various other things. Quick Print spelling check sorting and stuff like that. But that's an overview of the basic layout and navigation of Excel to help you find your way around and find what you're looking for.