The Opening Display
Excel may take a minute or so to load, but once it has done so your screen should look like the diagram shown below.
Figure 2 The Opening Excel Screen
The Excel interface follows many Microsoft Windows conventions that users of other Windows programs will be familiar with. There is the main Excel window, menus, toolbars, a status bar and sub-windows.
The Main Excel Window
The main Excel window contains a title bar, a collection of
menus, two toolbars, a formula bar and a status
bar. If one of the subwindows becomes larger than the main window, or if
it shifts outside the area of the main window, then the main window will also
develop scroll bars.
Menus
Excel has nine main menus available when you are working on a worksheet. As
far as is possible these menus are organized and labelled exactly the same as
the menus in Word for Windows 6.0. If you are already familiar with Word for
Windows then you will be able to navigate your way around the menus quite
easily. The list of menu options available changes when you are viewing
charts. The menus follow the standard windows format of having the File and
Edit menus to the left hand side of the screen, and the Window and Help menus
on the right. The menus are described in more detail below:
Excel has some of its own file management capabilities, so there is a Find File capability to help you search for an elusive sheet, and there is also the option of saving summary information about the sheet you have created, similar to the information people have been able to save with Word documents.
Finally the command to exit Excel is here.
The Delete and Clear options relate to the removal of data inside a range of cells, or the removal of columns or rows in a worksheet, or else the removal of an entire sheet.
One change from Excel 4 is that the text find and replace functions are now in this menu (in common with Word) rather than in the old Formula menu.
Excel also has a View Manager that lets you organise how you view areas of your worksheet. These views are especially useful as they contain printer settingetstart. This means that you could have one view for printing on a dot-matrix printer, and another one for printing on a Laserwriter.
The Function command allows you to select your function from a categorised list when you are creating a formula. This is especially useful when you can't exactly remember the name or syntax of a particular function. The command dealing with the naming of ranges is also here.
From this menu you can also insert objects from other Windows programs such as a drawings, photographs or snippets of sound.
One excellent idea in Excel is the ability to save all these formatting options together in a style, just like you can in a word processor. This greatly enhances the ease with which consistently formatted spreadsheets can be produced.
The Consolidate command is one of the ways Excel uses its 3-D spreadsheet capabilities to compile the information from several sheets into one summary sheet.
The PivotTable.. command at the bottom of the menu is one of the most powerful features in Excel, allowing you to view information from your spreadsheet in a dynamic 3-dimensional model.
The middle section has to do with the worksheet you are looking at. The split command allows you to see up to four different areas of one spreadsheet all at once, and the freeze panes enables you to keep column and row headings on screen as you scroll through your document. Both of these features are extremely useful for managing large worksheets.
Shortcut Menus
Having menus to select your commands from often makes Windows programs easy to
learn but slow to use. Excel has two methods of avoiding a trawl through
complicated menus in order to find the relevant command. The first is the use
of the shortcut menu. If, at any point during your working with Excel, you
click the right mouse button then you will get up a list of menu
commands relevant to what you are doing at that point in time. For example, if
you have a single cell selected the commands in the pop-up menu will allow you
to cut/copy/paste information, clear the cell, add or remove columns and rows,
or else format the cell.
Toolbars
The second method Excel has to reduce your effort is a set of 9 toolbars which
contain buttons for many of the menu commands. These toolbars greatly enhance
the speed with which you will be able to use Excel. The standard two toolbars
are shown below.
Figure 13 The Two Standard Toolbars
To operate the buttons simply move the mouse over the button and click once. If you leave the mouse cursor over a button then you will soon get a little note up to tell you what that button does.
Figure 14 - Button Labels
The nine toolbars are as follows: Standard, Formatting, Chart, Drawing, Forms, Visual Basic, Auditing, Workgroup and Microsoft.
These can be called up by using the View Toolbars... command. When on screen they can either be as a line at the top of the screen (like the illustration above) or else they can be in a Window of their own that can be moved anywhere within the main Excel window.
Figure 15 The Standard Toolbar as a Floating Palette
Sub-Windows
Inside the main window are a collection of subwindows. The total number
of subwindows you can have open is limited by your computer's system resources,
but their types fall into three categories. When you first open Excel a single
subwindow opens automatically for you - the Workbook. The workbook
itself consists of a number of 'pages' and they can be of three different
types. The first is an ordinary Worksheet with the grid of cells. The
other two windows you will have to request specifically, either by asking for a
chart (which produces the Chart sheet) or by creating a new macro (the
Macro sheet).
Figure 16 A Blank Excel Worksheet
The way the worksheet appears can be altered by the Tools Options command. This lets you decide whether to show formulas or values, whether to display gridlines (data is often clearer without them) and whether to display row and column headings.
When working on a worksheet you work usually on one cell at a time, and
sometimes on groups of cells together. If you are working on a single cell,
the cell in question is surrounded by a thick border with a little box in the
bottom right hand corner. 
This border not only tells you which cell you are
working on but is also instrumental in many of Excel's cell moving and copying
operations.
If you are working on a range of cells, the selected range will appear black on the white background of the worksheet, and the border with its box will surround the entire range. However within that range there will still be on active cell and this will be white on the black background of the selected range.
Figure 17 A Selected Range
Figure 18 The Chart Toolbar
Most of the editing of a chart is done either by double clicking one area of the chart, or else by selecting commands from the altered menus and the Chart Toolbar.
Figure 19 - The Macro Submenu
The second type is a dialogue sheet. This replaces the old Dialogue Editor that was in Excel 4. Here you can draw out dialogue boxes for use with a Visual Basic module and thus create your own Excel applications.
The Excel 4 macro worksheet looks very like a normal worksheet, but with two major differences. The first and most noticeable difference is that the default column width on a macro sheet is much wider than it is in a normal worksheet. The second, and more important, difference is that by default normal worksheets display values rather than formulae - i.e. the results of a calculation rather than the syntax of a calculation. Macro sheets on the other hand display the formulae by default.
If you are already familiar with the Excel 4 macro language then you may want to continue using it and creating Excel 4 style macros. However, if you are new to Excel and/or new to writing Excel macros you are very strongly advised to go straight into using Visual Basic. Not only is it easier to use, but it is widely considered to be a more powerful language. If you learn Visual Basic for Excel then you will find it very easy to use the full Visual Basic professional. Also, and maybe more seriously, the Excel 4 macro language is being phased out, and there is a good chance that future versions of Excel will not support it, whereas they will support Visual Basic.
The only time the user needs to see a macro sheet is if they are writing their own macros. Users wanting to write their own macros are referred to the General Comments section at the end of this document.
