Wikipedia says: “Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft Office suite of software.”

The Excel Ribbon

Above is a screenshot of Excel 365 parts of the ribbon. The tabs are the menu headers. Within each tab there are groups. Within each group, there are command buttons and dialog launchers. A dialog is a pop-up window. New tabs may appear depending on what object you have selected in the worksheet. For example, if you have a table and you click inside the table, (in 365) you will see the tab Table Design appear to the right of Help.

The “newer” versions of Excel worksheets can contain at most 1,048,576 rows of data. If you are working with more than that, have a look at our Power Pivot series of posts and the Data Model. It can handle hundreds of millions of rows. Beyond that, you’ll need to look at a database management system (DBMS) to handle billions+ rows. Have a look at the article Excel specifications and limits.

An online learning source in over at ExcelJet. There are many others. I spend even more time just watching YouTube videos.

If you are interested in Excel Visual Basic for Applications, we have a series of posts starting with Excel VBA Introduction.

Microsoft Help for Excel

Here is the Excel help page. While we’re here talking about Microsoft Help, here is the page for Word and PowerPoint.

Microsoft 365 Quick Starts

Get up and running quickly with the basic info you need to be productive right away. Scroll down to the Downloadable guides section to download the free PDF files for several Office products. The Excel PDF is four pages.

Microsoft Excel Video Training

For some introductory videos on getting started with Microsoft Excel you could go to the training page. That page has 16 videos, each only about a minute long. It’s a good start if you are a beginner.

Formulas and Functions

A formula is a set of instructions that does a specific calculation using the data in a spreadsheet. Powerful calculations can be (and usually are) done automatically. In spreadsheets, formulas always start with an equals sign. A function is a preset command that automatically performs a specific process or task using the data in a spreadsheet. Functions give you the ability to do calculations, which can be anything from simple arithmetic to complex equations.

Here’s a good website that has an article of the 19 Most Useful Excel Skills That Will Make You Look Like a Spreadsheet Pro (Basic to Advanced) This is on the website Learn to Code with Me. It has brief explanations of the skills and links to videos. The first three are SUM, COUNT and AVERAGE. After that it has intermediate skills. They are PivotTables, Flash Fill, Filters, Conditional Formatting, COUNTIF, Charts, SUMIF, IFERROR, Slicers, Power Pivots, and Sparklines. The advanced skills are INDEX MATCH, Goal Seek, Macros in Excel VBA, INDIRECT, and Get External Data (from Web).