Master essential elements of the Microsoft Excel interface, from customizing the Quick Access Toolbar to using powerful built-in features like Smart Lookup and Insert Function. Learn efficient navigation and productivity tips to streamline your Excel workflow.
Key Insights
- The Quick Access Toolbar, located in Excel's upper left-hand corner, includes default icons for Save, Undo, and Redo commands, and users can customize it to include additional frequently used features like Spell Check for quick access.
- Excel provides useful research capabilities through the Smart Lookup feature found in the Review tab, allowing users to conduct quick research on selected topics directly within the application interface.
- The interface offers intuitive ways to perform calculations and navigation, including the Insert Function button that provides help resources and previews calculations, and detailed sheet navigation controls for efficiently moving among sheets in large workbooks.
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The Microsoft Excel User Interface. We're going to start this particular video off by talking about the Quick Access Toolbar. The Quick Access Toolbar is located in the upper left-hand corner.
By default, there will be three icons you'll find there. The first icon is the floppy disk icon, which represents saving your document. For those unfamiliar with the floppy disk, it's an old version of a thumb drive.
Then you have the Undo button. You'll use this a lot when you're starting out, because you'll make mistakes here and there, and you'll want to undo them. Then you have the Redo button.
It's not active right now because we haven't undone anything yet. Then you have this small dropdown that you can click on to choose other commands you'd like to add to your Quick Access Toolbar. Here are Microsoft's suggestions for the first set of commands that you may wish to add to your Quick Access Toolbar.
A popular one is Spelling. You want to make sure your document doesn't have any spelling mistakes, so you'll navigate over to Spelling, click once, and you now have the command available to you and have easy access with one click. When I click back on the dropdown, I see there's a check mark there that lets me know that I actually did select that and add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.
It's already there. Next, we'll take a look at the Ribbon tabs. You'll start off with eight Ribbon tabs, including the File tab, which is different from all the others.
If you click on File, you'll be taken to an area called Backstage. This is where you can access templates, create new documents, and open up existing documents. Then you have Home, which contains a list of the popular commands for Excel.
They're organized into groups. How are the groups organized? Well, you see these small line separators? They separate groups of commands, and the names of the groups are at the bottom. So this set of commands is in the Clipboard group.
This set of commands is in the Font group, and this set of commands is in the Alignment group. So as you're navigating the different tabs, take a look at the bottom and go to the particular group that contains the commands you want. That way, you won't have to look at every single command in the ribbon.
So that is the Ribbon tabs and the Ribbon groups. Let's continue. I'll show you an option that you have available to you if you choose the Review tab.
I'm going to select this cell that contains the word The Avengers. I may need to do research on The Avengers. On the Review tab, I can simply click Smart Lookup.
What will happen is a pane will open up to the side, and I will see information related to the text that's in my document. This is a great way to do research on a particular topic without leaving the Excel application. Now I'm going to close this.
Spell Check, by the way, is located on the Review tab as well, and you can click right there to access Spell Check. If you hover your mouse over certain commands, you'll see a keyboard shortcut—F7 is the keyboard shortcut for spelling.
Now let's take a look at the Insert Function button. When I teach my classes, I start off by telling students I'm a mathematical genius. I can compute numbers in my head without even using any kind of SUM function.
I tell them all I have to do is select some cells, and using the power of my mind, I can tell them that the total for the values I just selected is 3,012. Another part of the user interface you may not notice is in the status bar. In the status bar, if you select some cells, you'll see some information related to the cells that you just selected.
Now, I actually want to add these numbers up, so I am going to go to the interface element that we're talking about here called the Insert Function button. If you move your mouse just above the column letters, you'll see a command that you can access that has the letters FX. If I click FX, it opens up this dialog box, and this allows me to choose functions that I might want to use to calculate the sum of values directly above the cell.
The reason I go over this section is you can get help related to the functions you may be unfamiliar with. While I'm familiar with SUM, let's say there are other functions I'm not familiar with. All I have to do is click "Help on this function, " and a webpage will open.
I'm going to bring that webpage into view. It'll take me to a Microsoft webpage where I can play a video that walks me through the process of using the SUM function. So this is a nice bit of self-help that you can do for yourself.
If you need further instructions, you can scroll down and take a look at step-by-step screenshots that will walk you through the process of using the SUM function. I'm going to close this, and now let's actually use the SUM function. All I will need to do is click OK, and you'll see Excel automatically does the typing for me.
It also gives me a preview of what the answer is so I can see if it looks right and it automatically selects the values. All I need to do now is click OK, and I've added those values in the cell. Let's take a look at another user interface element, the Zoom slider.
I may need to zoom into my spreadsheet, so down at the bottom right-hand corner, I have plus and minus signs that I can use to increase or decrease the spreadsheet by 10% at a time. Now, since we just worked with the SUM function, if I take a look right next to the Insert Function (FX) button, I will see Equal SUM. This is a formula bar, and this will reveal whether or not there are formulas in the cell that I have selected, and you can see the SUM function has targeted cells E24 to E27.
Another method you can use to zoom in and out of your spreadsheet involves holding the Control key and using the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have a scroll wheel. This allows you to zoom in and out of your spreadsheet very easily and intuitively. Now let's take a look at the Sheet Selector buttons.
They're located towards the bottom of your spreadsheet. In order for us to see the Sheet Selector buttons, we actually need to drag this part of the Sheet tab area inward to see some hidden tabs. Now I can see arrow keys that I can click on to reveal more sheets that I can't see, and I can use the arrow keys to move over to the left.
If I quickly want to get to the end of the set of sheets that are here, I can press the Control key and click the right arrow key, and I jump all the way to the end. I can also press Control and click the leftmost triangle to jump to the beginning. If I want to navigate my sheets in a vertical fashion, I can right-click anywhere on the triangles to bring up a pop-up menu, and you'll get a vertical listing of all the sheets.
If you need to jump to a certain sheet, you can simply select it and click OK, and you'll jump to that specific sheet. So I'm going to return to the interface, and now let's take a look at rows and columns. Each spreadsheet in Excel contains 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows.
Excel provides ample space to work with data in your spreadsheet. So that completes the interface section.