Excel spreadsheets
can contain formulas that update automatically.
Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are documents used to store, sort, compute and manage data. People from a wide variety of disciplines use such documents, including those in the social and physical sciences; common private sector businesses; and schools. Excel's extensive set of tools accommodates this broad appeal: Users can create and manage mailing lists; perform statistical functions (for example, find the average for a list of numbers); and create charts that illustrate a company's performance, among many other tasks. Those who know the program well, besides using its default functionality, extend that functionality with Excel's built-in scripting language, Visual Basic.
Grids
Excel's spreadsheets initially appear as grids, with the grid's cells separated from one another by light gray vertical and horizontal bars. Above a spreadsheet's topmost row of cells is the series of column headings, which are labeled alphabetically--"A," "B," "C" and onward for a total of 16,384 columns. To the left of a spreadsheet's left-most cells are the row headings, which are labeled with numbers: 1 to 1,048,576.
Cell Addresses
By specifying a column heading followed by a row heading, users can identify precisely a range of one or more cells. For example, "B3" refers to the spreadsheet's second column from the left and third row from the top, while "C4:D5" specifies these four cells: C4, C5, D4 and D5.
Types of Data
Excel's spreadsheets can contain numbers, text, formulas and comments. Also, linked to each cell are parameters for controlling the text or number format of the cell's content, and for applying borders, highlighting and other visual information to the cell. For example, users can specify that a particular cell will display numbers with a currency format like $1,234.56. In this cell, any numbers with more than three decimals will appear as being rounded to two decimals--though the actual three-decimal number remains unchanged.
Automatic Updating
One of the benefits of using Excel spreadsheets (and spreadsheets of other software publishers) is cells that recalculate automatically. For example, someone preparing a mailing list will typically have columns with the headings "First name," and "Last name." Although this user's data doesn't include full names, they can easily be computed and stored in a third column ("Full name").
The user can perform this computation by inserting in the "Full name" field a predefined text function that concatenates (joins) the "First name" field's text with the "Last name" field's text. As soon as the user enters text into these first two fields, the concatenate function in the "Full name" field will join the text they contain, and populate itself with the result of that joining.
Excel updates all of a spreadsheet's functions automatically by default, which can slow processing time for spreadsheets with many functions. Users can avoid this problem by changing Excel's updating option from automatic to manual.
Charts and Other Graphics
Excel's spreadsheets can hold more than text and formulas in individual cells. For example, users can create charts from cells containing numerical data, and size and position them anywhere in the spreadsheet.
Clip art, predefined images for presentations, is another graphical element that users can place anywhere on a spreadsheet. Additionally, users can insert text elements and format every element of a spreadsheet. These elements exist on a different graphical layer from the text and data in the spreadsheet cells, which means that they won't disturb any cell data.
Tags: Excel spreadsheets, name field, Full name, anywhere spreadsheet, cells example