This document provides an overview of the menus in Microsoft Excel. It discusses the main functions of the Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, and View menus. It also demonstrates how to insert and format charts using built-in Excel functions. Additional topics covered include PivotTables, removing duplicate entries, conditional formatting, and some commonly used Excel formulas. The overall purpose is to help users better understand the Excel interface and utilize key tools and features.

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Microsoft Excel
It’s easier than you think!

2. Understanding The Menus
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3. Excel Menus: A snapshot
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4. Excel Menus: A snapshot
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We’ve got Home menu, Insert menu, Page Layout menu, Formula
menu, Data menu, Review menu and View menu. In the next
slides, each of these menus will be discussed in practical terms.
There is one more menu that is hidden by default: Developer
menu. It won’t be discussed because it is used mainly for
including a macro (program) in an Excel file.

5. Excel Menus: Home Menu
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The home menu is Excel’s most used menu. It has very straightforward sub-menus.
Clipboard: Allows you to copy, cut and paste in Excel
Font: Allows you to set font size, color, background color (fill) & turn on bold or italics or underline.
Alignment: Allows you to set the position of whatever you’ve typed (or copied) into Excel. It also
allows you to set how it’s written: horizontal, vertical or slanting.
Number: Allows you to set how a number is shown in Excel: regular number, currency, scientific,
percentage, fraction…
Styles: Allows you to set the format of an Excel cell based on the data it holds (conditional
formatting). It also allows you to convert a selection of cells to table, and to set quick formats for a
cell.
Cells: Allows you to insert new cells, delete cells and change cell format.
Editing: Houses the very useful Sort and filter tools. And also Find & Select, Find & Replace. There’s
also Autosum which helps you sum all numbers in a selection.

6. Excel Menus: Insert Menu
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The Insert menu houses some of Excel’s best tools.
Tables: Allows you to insert PivotTable, PivotChart and Table. Inserting a table in Excel allows for
quick formatting, and better formulas (via named ranges). PivotTable and PivotChart will be
discussed later.
Illustrations: Allows you to insert images and shapes.
Charts: Allows you to insert charts, which will be discussed later.
Sparklines: Allows you to insert charts that fit into one Excel cell. Makes some reports beautiful and
easy to read.
Filter: Allows you to filter out field values you are not interested in.
Links: Allows you point a cell content to a website or an email address.
Text: Allows you to insert texts and objects (pretty much anything, including a PDF document)
Symbols: Allows you to type out equations and special symbols.

7. Excel Menus: Page Layout Menu
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The Page Layout menu does just that: setting up your Excel document’s page look and for
printing.
Themes: It’s not very useful; it sets the look of the Excel window itself.
Page Setup: It allows you to set how the page comes out when printed. Most used are the
Orientation (to set as Portrait or Landscape) and Print Area (to select on the cells you want to
print).
Scale to Fit: It allows you to set how much is printed per page. Most frequent use is to force
Excel to print on one page, or fit all the fields (columns) on one page width.
Sheet Options: You wouldn’t to change the default. It allows you set whether Excel gridlines
be printed or not, and headings too. Default is no/off (unticked).
Arrange: It lets you rearrange overlapping objects (shapes, images, textboxes…). Or align
them.

8. Excel Menus: Formulas Menu
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The Formula menu gives you access to Excel’s built-in formulas.
Function Library: It has the formulas grouped by category. Once you have an idea of what you
want done, it helps you locate the formula to use. It’s good to look through it once in a while
to have an idea of the out-of-the-box analysis Excel can do.
Defined Names: Lets you name a selection of cells. Can be very useful when analyzing a big
database.
Formula Auditing: Allows you to check for errors in your formulas and see how your final
result is being calculated.
Calculation: Allows you to set when the formulas in your Excel sheet are calculated:
automatic (whenever a cell value changes) or manual (at first entry and when you force them
to be recalculated).

9. Excel Menus: Data Menu
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The Data menu allows you to work with external data and do basic data formatting.
Get External Data: It allows you to import or link to an external data file (non-Excel file). You’ll use
it whenever you have a data in text file and need it worked on in Excel.
Connections: Allows you to make changes to the connections/links to an external data file. Or force
a refresh of the connections to capture changes made in the external data file since last
connection.
Sort & Filter: Allows you to sort data and do some filtering too. Filter allows you to specify values
to display.
Data Tools: Allows you do very basic data analysis. Especially removing duplicate entries, and
splitting one field into several (text-to-column). Example is splitting full name into First name and
Last name.
Outline: Allows you to group (and hide) several rows. Useful for large data reports with few
categories; helps to group categories.

10. Excel Menus: Review Menu
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The Review menu is for spell checks, commenting and setting access
restrictions.
Proofing: Allows you to carry out spell checks and word meaning checks.
Language: Allows you to translate the Excel file content from one language
to another.
Comments: Allows you to include comments in an Excel sheet, view all
comments once or delete comments.
Changes: Allows you to set access restrictions and track changes to the
Excel file. Also allows you to share the file.

11. Excel Menus: View Menu
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The View menu allows you to change the window layout of the Excel document. It doesn’t
change anything in the actual document, just the way it’s displayed.
Workbook views: Allows you to set how the workbook (Excel file) is displayed.
Show: Controls what not printing details are shown: Gridlines, Headings, Formula bar and
Ruler. The one you’ll be interested most in is Gridlines. If you want your Excel sheet to look
more like a Word file, untick the Gridlines. That’s what’s done to every Excel sheet you see
that has no Gridlines.
Zoom: Does what it says: sets zoom.
Window: Allows you to freeze headers so when you scroll they will never be out of view. And
also allows you to split the Excel sheet display, so you can compare two different parts of
the sheet.
Macros: Allows you to see the macros programmed in the Excel file (if there’s any macro in
it)

12. How Excel Handles What
You Type
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13. Entering Data in Excel
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In Excel, you type into small rectangular
boxes called cells. I would be referring to
everything you type or copy into Excel as
Data.
Every cell has an address, because each cell
is an intersection of a row and a column.
The cell selected in the image on the left,
is addressed as cell A1. It is the intersection
of column A and row 1.
Sometimes, what you type into a cell takes
more space than the cell has. Don’t worry,
just expand the column width by dragging
the right border of the column header.
Like this:

14. Different Data Types in Excel
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Excel recognizes 4 different data types: Text, Number, Boolean & Formula.
Text: Whenever you type alphabets, or a mix of alphabets and numbers into Excel (without preceding
with =), everything is recognized as text.
Number: If all you type into a cell are digits, they are recognized as Number by Excel.
Boolean: FALSE and TRUE are Boolean entries. You’ll hardly use them. They are used for setting up
complex formulas. But always take note that whenever you type false or true in a cell, Excel will put
it upper case and see it as Boolean.
Formula: Once you begin a cell entry with =, Excel treats everything you type after as a formula. In
the image on the left, I was multiplying the number in cell B2 by 45.

15. Making Cool Excel Charts
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17. How Are Charts Made?
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Charts are made from tables.
Remember your elementary Math?
There’s always a table showing values for
different variables (or categories) that
you want to visualize.
Charts enable us to convene information
in powerful ways, visual ways that are
easy to interpret and act on. And that’s
why it’s important that you know how to
manipulate charts beyond the default
Excel gives you.
I will be showing you how to make a great
chart that is easy to read and good to
look at.
We’ll be using the table on the right.
State Male Female
Male to
Female
Ratio
Arizona
1,067,974 1,120,122
0.95
Florida 466,134 727,256 0.64
Georgia 1,151,055 1,356,779 0.85
Indiana 1,514,051 1,582,127 0.96
Montana 1,006,313 1,906,112 0.53
Ohio 1,705,384 1,295,645 1.32
Texas 1,980,948 1,787,642 1.11

18. Inserting a Chart
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Select the entire table
Goto Insert menu and select the Chart type you want
There are 11 Chart types in Excel. But as long
as you won’t be making charts for a Ph.D
research, you’ll only bother yourself about 4.
Column: This chart type is the most used.
Recommended for comparing values directly
(side by side).
Line: This recommended for comparing change
in value over time. Or showing a trend across
variables (like a ratio across states).
Pie: Used for showing how much each variable
take in a total. Shows a visual of the
percentage of each part.
Bar: Same use as Column but used when the
variables have very long names, and for some
economic data visualization.

19. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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We’ll be using two chart types in our
chart: Column chart to show the Male and
Female population for each state, and
Line chart to show the ratio trend across
the states.
But we are going to show all these in same
chart.
To start, select Column chart after
selecting the entire table. Select the first
in the 2-D Column chart types.
We’ll change the chart type for the ratio
and move it to a secondary axis (right
axis).

20. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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This is the default chart Excel will give you:
Excel default charts are usually
not good.
Take a look at the one we got.
The Legends are taking a third of
the Chart space.
No Chart title.
And it’s not looking cool at all.
We are going to change that.
But first let’s move the Male to
Female Ratio to a Line chart type.

21. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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Rightclick on one of the Male to Female Ratio bars and
Format Data Series. Move it to Secondary Axis

22. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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The chart will change to one similar to this:
Now, we have to move it to a Line chart type.
Rightclick on the Male to Female Ratio
bar again and select Change Series Chart
Type.

23. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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Select the first in the Line Chart types
And we almost done!
All that remains is to make the chart look better.

24. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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We’ll be moving the Legend down and inserting a
Chart title. But Excel has a nifty tool that does it
all for us.
Goto Design menu and select the 3rd Chart layout
type.
The Design menu shows only when you are
working on a Chart.
Here’s the result. Just one more step
and we are done.

25. Inserting a Chart (contd)
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I like including a fancy border in my charts.
Besides making the chart great, it allows
you to make everything blend by using your
official colors (blue or purple).
Goto Format menu and select one of the
Shape styles.
Format menu shows when you are working
on a chart.
And we are done!

26. Other Cool Useful Stuffs
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27. PivotTable
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PivotTable allows you to make sense of a
very large database. Like a census table
containing the biodata of everyone living in
Indiana.
With PivotTable you can easily create a table
showing population of Male and Female by
towns.
I love Pizza, so I’ll show an example with
Dhormino’s Pizza (they are more popular
than Domino’s).
I’ve got a sales table showing 5000 Pizza sold
on a Monday morning between 8:00am and
10:00am

28. PivotTable(contd)
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Our task is to show number of the
Pizza categories (Meatzza,
Margarita…) that were sold between
8:00am and 10:00am.
We could start counting them one by
one. Maybe starting with Margarita.
Or we could use Pivot Table.
If you don’t have 40 hours to dedicate
to doing this, then Pivot Table is the
answer.
Select the entire table, goto Insert
menu and click on PivotTable.
A dialogbox will pop up. Click on OK.

29. PivotTable(contd)
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A new Excel sheet will be created.
Click in the area specified to show
PivotTable control bar on the right.

30. PivotTable(contd)
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The PivotTable Control bar has 5 sections: field
selection part, Report Filter, Column Labels, Row
Labels and Values.
What we want is to create a table of all the different
Pizzas sold and the amount (count).
To do this, drag Pizza Sold field to Row Label. Then
drag it again (from the field selection part) to the
Values.

31. PivotTable(contd)
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And voila! The table of Pizzas and
amount sold is created for us.

32. Removing Duplicate Entries
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Occasionally, you’ll have to work with
an Excel table/database that has
duplicate entries that you want to get
rid off.
Excel has a built-in tool for that.
Just select the entire table and goto
Data menu, Remove Duplicates.

33. Conditional Formatting
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Conditional formatting is great for:
• Highlighting duplicates
• Highlighting values above a specified
value
• Marking cells based on their values
• Showing trends in a dashboard report
Goto Home menu, Conditional Formatting

34. Most Useful Excel Formulas & few tips
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Some Excel formulas are extremely
useful and are worth noting.
There are:
• VLOOKUP
• HLOOKUP
• IF
• IFERROR
• SUMIFS
• COUNTIFS
• INDEX
• MATCH
Excel is not as tough to use as most of us think.
Sure it takes time to get used to, but once you
get the basics of how it works you’ll enjoy
using it that Microsoft Word (like me).
The best way to become good in Excel is to ask
or Google for help whenever you’re stuck.
Guessing in Excel seldom works and often lead
to annoying errors.
Always have a second copy of any vital file
before working on it in Excel. It’s a good
practice that will save you headache someday.
Once again, Excel is fun.

35. THANK YOU!
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