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In This Chapter

▶ Getting the skinny on the Excel basics

▶ Writing formulas

▶ Working with functions in formulas

Excel is to computer programs what a Ferrari is to cars: sleek on the outside and a lot of power under the hood. Excel is also like a truck. It can handle all your data – lots of it. In fact, in Excel 2016, a single worksheet has 17,179,869,184 places to hold data. Yes, that’s what I said – more than 17 billion data placeholders. And that’s on just one worksheet!

Opening files created in earlier versions of Excel may show just the number of worksheet rows and columns available in the version the workbook was created with.

Excel is used in all types of businesses. And you know how that’s possible? By being able to store and work with any kind of data. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in finance or sales, whether you run an online video store or organize wilderness trips, or whether you’re charting party RSVPs or tracking the scores of your favorite sports teams – Excel can handle all of it. Its number-crunching ability is just awesome! And so easy to use!

Just putting a bunch of information on worksheets doesn’t crunch the data or give you sums, results, or analyses. If you want to just store your data somewhere, you can use Excel or get a database program instead. In this book, I show you how to build formulas and how to use the dozens of built-in functions that Excel provides. That’s where the real power of Excel is – making sense of your data.

Don’t fret that this is a challenge and that you may make mistakes. I did when I was ramping up. Besides, Excel is very forgiving. It won’t crash on you. Excel usually tells you when you made a mistake, and sometimes it even helps you correct it. How many programs do that? But first, the basics. This first chapter gives you the springboard you need to use the rest of the book. I wish books like this were around when I was introduced to computers. I had to stumble through a lot of this.