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Here we will go through how Excel is structured, where you will find important and smart functions, and various peculiarities you should know. In short, we’ll show you how to make the program work for you, so to speak, to ensure a smooth user experience. An introduction to Excel’s interface To work effectively in any program, you need to have an idea of what functions are available and where to find them. Excel is a sophisticated program with hundreds or even thousands of functions. But of course they are not all in a row; by learning the structure, you can find more functions when you need them. Like Word, Excel uses a layout where many, if not most, functions are located in the so-called Ribbon: the toolbar at the top of the program window, divided into tabs such as Home, Insert, and Data. Foundry Foundry Foundry Unlike Word, you don’t necessarily have to rummage around in these tabs, and many users have barely looked in tabs other than Start and Insert. However, there’s a lot to pick up if you start exploring them. Home: Basic formatting and shortcuts to commonly used functions like AutoSum and Filter. Insert: When you want a chart, table, image, or text box. Page Layout: Only if you are going to print. Formulas: One of Excel’s most important features is all the built-in mathematical formulas, and this tab helps you find formulas based on areas such as finance, text, and math. Data: Mainly for connecting to external data sources such as databases, but also has some features useful to anyone. Review: Is someone other than you going to work in a document, or will you continue to use the same document for a long time? Then comments and tracking are very useful, and you can find them here. View: In addition to previewing for printing, you can lock the first row and/or column, which can be very useful in a large table. There are also settings here to display the open spreadsheet in multiple windows so you can look in several places at once. What we think you’ll notice as you become more familiar with Excel, however, is that you’ll rarely need to leave the Home tab. Almost all the functions in the other tabs either have keyboard shortcuts or are formulas you can learn. Rearrange the menus Do you find the order of commands in the menus impractical, or are you missing some handy feature? Excel has great options for setting what to include and in what order. Right-click in a blank space anywhere in the Ribbon and select Customize Ribbon, or select File > Options and click on Customize the ribbon. Foundry Foundry Foundry On the right side of the dialogue box, you will find the existing content and layout of the Ribbon. There you can add new tabs and groups inside tabs, but also reorder what is already there. For example, say you are not using Styles-functions in the Home tab very often, but you do use the Editing functions like AutoSum and Sort and Filter. Then you can simply grab and drag Styles so it is last in the list under Home. Press OK and Excel will save the change. In the list on the left you will normally find Popular Commands but if you’re looking to add handy features that are not there you can select Commands not in the Ribbon in the drop-down menu under Choose commands from. Spreadsheet The bulk of the work in Excel is done in the grid of cells in rows and columns that make up the spreadsheet itself. This is where you build tables, fill in formulas, and rearrange, sort, and make sense of data. Make friends with this grid — it makes everything easier. The grid starts at the top left with row 1, column A. You don’t have to start there, you can put numbers and other things in any cells you like. New documents are created with a blank sheet called Sheet1 — you add new ones by pressing the plus button at the bottom left of the program window. Each sheet can handle a maximum of 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. Each cell can contain a maximum of 32,767 characters and 253 line breaks. You always have plenty of room, to say the least. Wherever you are in the grid, you can see row and column numbers, and these have several important functions. Foundry Foundry Foundry Right-click on one of these row or column numbers. For example, in the context menu that appears, you will find the functions Insert and Delete. Insert adds a new row or column above or to the left of what you clicked on, and moves all content one step down or to the right. Formulas that reference a particular cell are automatically changed when you do this — you don’t need to go in and change anything yourself. If you have copied or cut one or more cells before right-clicking, Insert is replaced by Paste copied/cut cells. Depending on how you copied, this may move only some rows/columns or all of them. Click on one of the numbers and the whole of that row or column will be selected. You can use this to copy all the content in it, for example, or to change the format of the content. A typical use is when you want to paste numbers, text, and dates into a column and don’t want Excel to format these differently but just as plain text. How number formats work in Excel A cell in Excel can contain different kinds of data, which in turn can be formatted in different ways. You can see what format a cell has by selecting it and looking in the Numbers section in the Home tab. It is important to understand the difference between what the content looks like and what it actually is. Take dates, for example. When you enter a date in a blank cell that has the number format General, Excel recognizes it and automatically changes the number format to Date. Select the cell and click on the drop-down menu where it now says Date. You can see here that if you switch to the Text format, the content will be displayed as a number. 25 March 2020, for example, becomes 43915. Foundry Foundry Foundry This is because dates are internally stored as numbers where “1” means 1 January 1900. You cannot use dates earlier than that in Excel, so genealogists and others will have to work around it by, for example, using text format instead of date format. You can still sort in date order as long as you follow the ISO standard of year-month-day, but you cannot use such cells in calculations of, for example, the number of days between two dates. Such problems can also be overcome, but it is too advanced for this guide. Formulas You can of course use Excel only to manually enter text, dates, and numbers in tables. But the usefulness of the program comes from writing formulas that retrieve data from other cells, perform calculations of various kinds, and put the results in their cell. As long as you don’t create circle references (where the contents of one cell depend on the contents of a cell whose contents depend on the contents of the first cell), you can have formulas that reference formulas that reference formulas — and so on. Make a change at the beginning of the chain and the results change all the way to the last step. A formula always starts with an equal sign. After that, you do not write mathematical formulas according to Excel’s special syntax. It’s similar to regular math, but it’s still its own thing. =PMT(B6/12;B8*12;B4)=OM(H8>250000; (H8-250000)*0,05; 0)+OM(H8>175000;OM(H8> References to cells are written with the letter of the column followed by the row number, for example B6 or H8. An important thing to learn is the difference between a relative reference and an absolute one. Say you are building a table with prices, quantities, and costs: For example, Cucumber – $1/piece – 3 pieces – $3. You might fill in the first three columns manually, but the last one is suitable for a formula. If it says Cucumber in A2, $1 in B2, and 3 in C2, you can fill in the following formula in D2: =B2*C2. Foundry Foundry Foundry If you then fill in A3: Tomatoes, B3: $2/pound, C3: 2.5 pounds, you can copy D2 and paste it into D3 and Excel will automatically fill in the correct formula: =B3*C3. This is called a relative reference. By placing dollar signs on both sides of the column letter (for example $B$2), the reference becomes absolute. This means that if you copy the formula and paste it into another cell, that reference will still be to the exact same cell. For example, this could be a cell where you enter an interest rate to be used in many places in a table. You can mix relative and absolute references in a formula. We can go a bit deeper into how to use advanced math in Excel, for example to calculate with roots and exponents, which are common in economics. A simple example: Calculate what the daily interest rate is if the annual interest rate is 2.5 percent using the formula =(1+A1)^(1/365)-1 (in A1 you have filled in 2.5% or 0.025). How to use data from Excel in Word documents Excel has its own functions for simple layout, but if you are writing a report or similar and want to use data from large Excel tables, it’s easy to link the two Office programs. Foundry Foundry Foundry If you have very simple data or simply prefer to format tables in Excel, you can select what you want and simply paste it into Word. However, this means that you will have to make any changes manually in Word. If you want to be able to have up-to-date figures and charts, it’s much more practical to link or embed. Start by selecting what you want to paste into Excel. Open the Word document and place the pointer in the right place. Select the Paste > Paste special. Select the As: Microsoft Excel spreadsheet object. Select either Paste or Paste link on the left. The former means that a copy of the content is inserted directly into Word and you can edit it there. The latter means that you create a link to that part of the Excel sheet and to make changes you have to do it in Excel. Linked content can be very useful if you have a large, complicated spreadsheet in Excel and want to paste just the result of all the calculations, either a table or a chart. Then you can go in and add, delete or change data in Excel and get updated results in Word. Learn keyboard shortcuts Excel is full of keyboard shortcuts and if you watch a veteran user work, you’ll probably find that they very rarely reach for the mouse. You can do almost anything you can think of with the keyboard alone, and it’s often quicker than rummaging through menus with the mouse. We don’t have space to go through all the handy keyboard shortcuts, but here’s a small selection of the most useful commands that are unique to Excel (copy, paste, select all, and the like you probably already know): Tab – when you start filling in a formula, Excel displays a list of suggestions. Use the arrow key to select the right one and press Tab to fill it in. For example, you can type a long formula name like NET WORKING DAYS faster. F4 – toggles between relative and absolute references for the cell reference you have the pointer in, so you don’t have to type dollar signs. The order is relative -> absolute row and column -> absolute row -> absolute column. F2 – edit the selected cell. Alt-Return – insert row break in a cell. Ctrl-D – first select a number of cells in one or more columns. Ctrl-D then copies the contents of the topmost cell of each selected column to the selected cells below it. Ctrl-Home followed by Shift-Ctrl-End – select the entire used area of the open sheet. Ctrl-arrow key – jump to the last cell with content before an empty cell, in the direction the arrow points. Shift-Ctrl-arrow key – select all cells with content starting from the cell you have now selected, in the direction of the arrow. Ctrl-H – open Find and Replace where you can quickly replace, for example, incorrect periods with commas and the like. Select a number of cells, rows, or columns beforehand to limit the function to these. There are hundreds more. When you hover over a function in the menus, you can see that function’s keyboard shortcut, and you can also check out Microsoft’s list here. This article was translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcforalla.se. Business, Personal Software, Professional Software Read...

For many years, Microsoft sold its productivity software Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on in a bundle called Microsoft Office. In 2013, the company saw where the software industry was heading and began a transition to a subscription-based model. The suite of applications and a growing set of services continued to be called Office 365 until 2020, when it was given its current name, Microsoft 365. The company would like to see all Windows users have a subscription, and is doing its best to entice them with advertising in Windows. This seems unnecessary, as the service is one of the most affordable subscriptions on the consumer market. In this article, I’ll go through why this is the case, what’s included, and which subscription you should choose. Further reading: Outlook: How to set up breaks between your meetings Ed Hardie Ed Hardie Ed Hardie Everything included in Microsoft 365 From being basically just the three basic Office programs and a few helper functions, Microsoft 365 has grown to consist of around 10 programs and a number of services. Some are also available as free versions without much difference, but most are significantly more powerful in the paid version. Here are the programs and services that are only included with a subscription. WordMicrosoft’s advanced word processing program has hundreds of features and can do most things with text, except possibly make it look good in print. ExcelThe world of finance would stand still without Microsoft spreadsheet software. There are alternatives, but the Windows version of Excel is by far the most capable of working with huge amounts of numbers. PowerPointPresentations may not be as important to home users, nor as common in businesses as they once were, but they still have a place and a tool to create them: PowerPoint. OneDrive with 1TB of spaceMicrosoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service can be used either like Dropbox to sync data between different devices and the cloud, or as a fully cloud-based storage for files you don’t want to offload from your computer. With a subscription, each account gets 1TB of space. OutlookTired of webmail and prefer a real email program? Microsoft Outlook is one of the best, even for home users. Confusingly, subscribers also have increased storage space on the separate Outlook.com email service — 50GB instead of 15GB. Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft OneNoteIf you’ve never tried OneNote, it can be hard to understand what it’s for, but it’s widely used in schools and elsewhere. The program is a kind of digital bulletin board where you can collect text, images, and other things. ClipchampMicrosoft’s equivalent of Apple’s iMovie — a simple video editing program that allows you to do a little more with all the videos you record with your mobile phone. For example, you can edit a holiday film. PublisherThis desktop publishing program is a better way than Word to produce printed materials such as posters, leaflets, and more, although it’s not in the same league as Adobe Indesign or Quarkxpress. Available only as a Windows program. AccessDatabases. You might think it’s just for businesses, but in fact a database program like Access can serve as a relatively easy way to create your own applications. Like Publisher, Access is only available as an old-fashioned Windows program. Foundry Foundry Foundry Microsoft EditorA new AI-based tool embedded in Word and Outlook and available as a Chromium extension. Editor helps you write better by suggesting language improvements and spelling and grammar corrections. Microsoft FormsHelps you create and distribute surveys. Very useful for some, completely uninteresting for others. SkypeSkype is not nearly as popular today as it was 10 to 15 years ago, but in one area it is hard to beat: international phone calls. A Microsoft 365 subscription includes 60 minutes of calls to many countries every month. pch.vector / Freepik pch.vector / Freepik pch.vector / Freepik Individual or family Microsoft 365 for consumers comes in two flavors: Personal and Family . Personal costs $69.99 a year or $6.99 a month, Family costs $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month. Paying annually gives a 16.7 percent discount. But see below for a tip on how to reduce the price further. The difference between the two subscriptions is that Family includes up to six separate accounts, each of which gets 1TB of OneDrive space and 60 Skype minutes. Each account can also activate the Office programs on up to five devices. In other words, you get six accounts for the price of 1.43 accounts. For those who don’t have a family to share the subscription with, it might seem natural to choose Personal, but it’s not quite that simple. 5TB more cloud space for $30 extra a year is nothing to sneeze at, although it does require a bit more fiddling to utilize than a cloud storage service that provides all the space in one account. Further reading: How to get Microsoft Office 365 for cheap I can give a personal example that illustrates the benefit of choosing Family even for a single user. I use two of my six Family accounts solely for backing up my computer; one account each for two 1TB SSDs. I use the Arq Backup software, which is sold as a one-off license, and the cost per year is much lower than with Backblaze, for example. It won’t work for everyone, but is definitely worth considering. Another option is to get a Family subscription with some friends or relatives you don’t live with and share the cost. Each account is its own, separate account and the ‘administrator’ — the one who pays for the subscription and invites the others — does not have access to any other members’ data. So no one has to worry about being spied on. Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Buy discounted activation codes When you subscribe to Microsoft 365, the company will activate auto-renewals that each month or year will deduct the regular price. But there’s another way to renew your subscription — with activation codes you buy from other stores. Activation codes are often sold at a discount, especially around Black Friday but also during the rest of the year. You can activate for up to five years, so if you find a really good price, you can grab several codes at once, as long as you know you’ll want the Office programs for that long. Marvin Meyer Marvin Meyer Marvin Meyer Business subscriptions Businesses and other organizations have a different set of Microsoft 365 subscriptions to choose from: Business Basic – $6 per month per user, web and mobile versions of Office applications only (not including Windows or Mac applications). Business Standard – $12.50 per month per user, same as Basic but with the desktop programs. Business Premium – $22.00 per month per user, same as Standard plus advanced security features. Business Applications – $8.25 per month per user, just the desktop applications for Windows and Mac plus 1TB of OneDrive storage. In addition to the above programs and services, a number of business-oriented features are also included that are not available in personal subscriptions. These are mainly SharePoint, Exchange (email) with support for your own domain, the web version of the powerful Visio visualization tool, and the “real” version of Teams. These prices are exclusive of VAT as it is aimed at businesses. In practice, there is nothing to stop self-employed people buying a private subscription and using it at work, for those who don’t need their own domain for email or have it otherwise, and don’t need any of the other unique features. Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft Standalone license – usually a bad choice For those who refuse to pay for subscriptions, Microsoft actually still sells a standalone Office package on license, called Microsoft Office Home & Student. It costs $149.99 and the last update came in 2021 so the programs are not the latest versions. However, Microsoft has announced that it plans to release a new version towards the end of 2024. What is included is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — no other programs, nor any services. For most people, this is a worse buy than the subscription, as the programs are not updated with new features and functions like OneDrive are not included. But there are situations where it’s still better, for example for a computer that won’t have internet access and where you want to be able to use the basic programs without restrictions indefinitely. Slash RTC Slash RTC Slash RTC Extended support Free users will have to make do with support documents and Microsoft’s support forums, but Microsoft 365 subscribers will have access to manned support via chat or phone. That can make a big difference if something goes wrong. This extended support applies not only to the components of Microsoft 365 but also to Windows 10 and 11, so you can get help from a human being if Windows updates are failing, if you’re worried you might have been hit by malware, or anything else. Customers who buy a standalone license for the Office programs also get support via chat but not by phone. Ed Hardie Ed Hardie Ed Hardie Stingy? What’s included in free accounts Some of the features included in Microsoft 365 are also available for free to anyone who gets a Microsoft account. Here’s what’s included even if you don’t want or can’t afford to pay. Web and mobile apps for Word, Excel, and PowerPointHas all the basic features of the three main programs in the old Office suite, but only via a web browser. OneDrive with 5GBFree accounts don’t get a lot of room to move around, but the Windows program to sync files and folders is included and it works great for those who, for example, have a folder of important files they want to access on all devices. Outlook on the web and for mobilesMicrosoft has not made it easy to understand the jungle of different versions of Outlook, but for free users there are two completely separate Outlooks. The web mail client and email service Outlook.com is free and gives you an @outlook.com address with 15GB of space, and the Outlook mobile app for Android and iOS is free and works with most email services such as Gmail, Apple iCloud, and Yahoo Mail. Skype and TeamsYou don’t have to pay anything to use Skype or Teams for individuals, although Skype does have a bonus for subscribers. Skärmdump Skärmdump Skärmdump Options – full office suite or individual programs and services Don’t like subscriptions, or just tired of Microsoft’s programs? There are plenty of alternatives, both free and paid programs. What’s right for you depends a lot on what you’re actually looking for. There’s so much included in Microsoft 365 that you can’t replace the whole package with a single option from another developer. If you’re mainly looking for something to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the best options are free and open source, like Libreoffice and Freeoffice. For OneDrive, there are many options, from Google Drive and Apple iCloud to smaller players like Shadow Drive and pCloud. You can also create your own cloud storage service that synchronizes folders between different devices using tools such as Syncthing and Seafile. Further reading: Best cloud backup services The best thing to do is to look for alternatives to the particular program you want to replace, and to think about what you need it for. If you use Word to write books, you have very different choices than if you use it to write emails and need features like Mail Merge. Personal Software Read...