How to use Microsoft Excel - Improving Work Sheet Appearance - part 7

In the last lesson we entered data and formulas on our worksheet. Now we want to improve the appearance of the worksheet. We’ll begin by opening the file. We’ll use the open button on the standard tool bar, we click on the button and the open dialogue box appears. It shows the theater folder because that’s the last folder we used. The file list shows the summer sales file we created and saved. These other files are not part of your software. These are files we created.

To open a file we double click on its file name when we do the file is opened. We’re ready to make some changes. We’ll begin by inserting a blank row above the monthly totals to make them standout more. We select any cell where we want the row inserted then we open the insert menu. We’ll click on rows, when we do a row is inserted and the existing rows will down. Now we’ll add three blank rows at the top for a heading. We select cells in the first three rows. This time we’ll use a shortcut menu, we right click on the selected cells. In the shortcut menu we click on insert, we can insert a block of cells shifting cells out of the way as necessary or we can insert entire rows or columns. We select entire row. When we click on okay three blank rows are inserted. Now let’s look at one of our formulas the cell references have automatically changed to reflect the new location of the data. So the formula results are still correct.

We can insert or delete cells, rows, or columns and our formulas will all adjust accordingly. Now, we’ll type our heading. In the first blank row we type the theater name and press the down arrow. Notice that the text is wider than one cell and overflows into the next cell. This happens at the adjoining cell is empty. In the second row we type in enter the worksheet title with the name of our summer show. Once we’ve entered data we often want to sort it to put it in a different order. Our three ticket price rows are currently in no particular order. We want to sort them by total sales from highest to lowest. To start we select the cell in the column we want to sort by. This button sorts in ascending order from A to Z and from lower numbers to higher. This button sorts in descending order which is what we want. When we click on it the records are instantly sorted by total sales. Half price ticket sales are now on the bottom. Notice that excel sorted the Excel sorted the ticket sales rows including the labels but it left the column labels alone. Excel automatically reads the way a list like this is set up and then sorts it correctly.


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