All right. Welcome to the course. We're going to talk about, in this screen cast, the basic features of Excel. This screen cast, in this course, is meant for people who have never seen Excel before. It's also meant for those who have seen Excel before, I'm sure you'll learn quite a bit in this course. So let's look at some of the basic features of Excel. What version of Excel should or can you use? Well, Windows Excel 2019 Office 365, I'll talk about the differences between those two in the next slide, but those are the preferred formats for using Excel in this course. If you don't have Excel 2019, then Windows Excel 2016 will work just fine. If you do have Windows Excel 2013 or earlier, it depends how early, I don't think most of this will work with Excel 1995, but 2013 or earlier will be mostly fine, but there are going to be some things that you can't do. I know there's a lot of Mac users out there. If you have Mac Excel 2019, so the 2019 will be mostly fine. Earlier than that, you might run into some problems, but if you want to follow closely along with this course, I highly recommend installing Windows, Office and Excel by partitioning your hard drive using Boot Camp or Parallels to install the Windows version of Office. I do have a document in the course called For Mac users, main issues with Mac Excel, it doesn't support some advanced features like pivot charts. If you are interested in using macros in which you can highly customize your Excel worksheets, there are major VBA limitations, and if you want to follow closely along with this course, there are major differences in the shortcut keys that I use. So if you do have a Mac, don't be discouraged, but I would recommend installing Office, and please again, see that document for Mac users. So let me explain the difference between Office 365 versus Excel 2019. Many of you in the past, including myself, have purchased what is known as a perpetual license. You purchased Excel 2016 or 2013 and so on, and it's a onetime purchase that's known as a perpetual license, and essentially, you own that forever. However, Microsoft is moving more towards a subscription-based service, and that's what Office 365 is. It's more of a monthly fee or annual fee. The nice thing about Office 365 is it's continually updating. So you have the internet, and you get occasional updates. It's more like a living software programs. So if Microsoft adds functions, then once that's available, it'll automatically update to those users of Office 365 Excel. However, with 2019 and some of these previous ones, 2016, 2013, there are no updates. It's just a one-time install, a onetime payment, and you can use that forever. These are some different things to consider. You might do some cost analyses and so on to see which one is best for you, but the nice thing about Office 365, again, is that is continually updated with new features and updates. So let's go right into Excel. This is what Office 365 Excel looks like, very similar to what Office 2019 will look like, 2016 is very similar. They made major changes, I think back in 2007 or 2010. So when you open up Excel, if you've never used it before, you see that it's a spreadsheet, you have all these cells and you can click around, and this is where we can put things. So you can type in different words. So I can type here, we can do simple calculations, equals 4 squared and press Enter, we'll get to all of that fairly soon in some subsequent screen cast, but I wanted to give you an overview of what this looks like. This main area up here, this entire region is known as the ribbon. On the ribbon, you have what are known as tabs. So we have a file tab here, that's how we can save. I'll get to that in a moment. We have the Home tab that has a lot of important things, insert, draw, and so on. You'll learn what these different tabs do, primarily through experience and through a screen cast. But let's go back to the home tab, on the ribbon in these various tabs, we have these groups. So you have the font group, alignment group, the number group, and so on, and in each of these groups, we have what is known as a command button. Let me go ahead and click down into cell F12, that's known as F12. In the alignment group, we have command buttons. So here is an align right. Let me make this a little bit bigger, we can drag the cell to make it bigger, and now if I click on the command button for align right, you see that we align that label to the right. So there's all sorts of command buttons in these different groups. There's also something known as the Quick Access Toolbar that's way up here at the top. You can customize it using this little drop-down menu. I'll show you a brief screen cast on doing that later on. But right now, all we have in the Quick Access Toolbar, we have save. So you can quickly save your worksheet. This arrow here is an undo. You can undo, once we've done something else, so let me just type in something equals 5 plus 4, if you undo, then this redo becomes available. So we can redo what we undid. I also wanted to show you how you can customize the view. So if I go to View tab here and I'm going to go into Zoom, click on Zoom, and I just want to make this a little bit bigger. For many of my screen cast, I'd like to have this at 200 percent magnification so you guys can all see what's going on. Let's get back to the ribbon. If you go away over here on the right, you can collapse the ribbon and there's a shortcut key for that control F1. So if you want more space, you can always collapse the ribbon by pressing on that. If you want to repin the ribbon, you can just click on any of these tabs, and way over here on the right, you can repin it so that it's always available. Another couple of important anatomical features about Excel. This bar here, this is known as the formula bar. If you click on a cell and you type equal, all formulas in Excel start with an equal, you'll notice that up here it's echoing that in something known as the formula bar. So 6 minus 2, it's echoed up here in the formula bar. So this is known as the formula bar. You press Enter to input that formula. The status bar is way down here on the left and right now it just says that we're ready. One quick thing about the status bar, if I put in three quick numbers there, and if I highlight those, then down here on the status bar on the lower right-hand side, it'll tell me average, the count, and the sum of those three numbers that I've put into those boxes and that I've highlighted. This is known as a selections. A couple of other basic features in Excel, there's a difference between a left mouse click and a right mouse click. So if I left-click, I can select cells like that. To make a selection, I can click and drag and then release the left mouse button. If you right-click, so a lot of times when you right-click on something, it'll bring up this context-sensitive menu. Up at the top, we have this mini menu here where you can easily format things. You don't actually have to go up here to the ribbon, you can highlight things straight from this mini bar. So I can, for example, fill that color yellow. So let's right-click again and we can do all sorts of different thing, and you learn about these in a subsequent screen cast. If you don't like to use the mouse, I think most people do prefer to use a mouse, but you can always on the keyboard press Alt, and when you do that, it brings up these letters and numbers. Let me just press Escape. If I wanted to insert a chart, just as an example, without using the mouse, I could press Alt and then insert is actually N, so I can press N, it opens up that tab, and then now I can go over here to, let's just say, Q, and it brings up those plots. That's how you can use the keyboard to do a lot of the navigation. I tend not to do this, in fact, I never use this, but I know there are some people who like to do this. I will continue talking about some of the basics of Excel in the next screen cast.
