Basic Functions

Excel can be a very powerful tool for displaying facts and figures, especially when you know how to make quick and easy use of its features to turn raw data into valuable information. Take a quick look at the sheet below: a simple chart showing you how many points 5 teams scored in a game lasting 4 rounds. We are going to tear this data apart and turn it into useable information.

Using Column G, we’ll make a Totals category where we’ll add all of each team’s 4 rounds of points to make their final scores. We could do this with a pencil and paper or calculator, or we could use the Excel special feature, AUTOSUM. In the big red circle is an odd looking E called sigma. Click the sigma under the Home tab to have Excel use its program to grab the nearest set of linked numbers, in this case, the Red team’s points. Excel will generate “Excel Formulas” for you. Press enter to select the default option, which reads “G3 equals the sum of B3 through F3,” which is typed “=sum(b3:f3)”.

To make matters simpler for handling Teams Yellow, Green, and Silver, simply hit COPY (or Control + C) on Red’s or Blue’s final score, then hit PASTE (or Control + V) in the empty Totals cells. Excel will use the same formula you used with Red and Blue, just altered for the correct rows.

Excel comes with other great features such as the MAX, MIN, and Average functions. There are over 220 different Excel features to customize a spreadsheet to your liking. Making use of just a few of them can greatly simplify your work, or improve the way you communicate data. To explain a few: MAX returns the largest number in a given set of numbers; Min returns the lowest; and Average returns, as you would guess, the average, or mean. They all operate just like the Sum function, and are in the Autosum submenu under the editing section of the Home tab. For additional help, press the F1 key.

Charts

This image of an Excel page will tell you mainly 2 things: 1) There were 4 teams, a, b, c, & d 2) The points each team scored How this information is displayed, however, is the key we will focus on in this tutorial.

The first step in making the chart for our teams is to highlight the data we want to make a chart of, then click on the Column submenu, as shown in circle 1. Next, pick which type of chart you want to use. In circle 2, we chose the column type.

Provided we highlighted the area shown, and clicked the box in the previous slide, we should see a completed graph on the grid.