Microsoft Excel X for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide

List Basics

Microsoft Excel's list or database features and functions help make it a flexible tool for creating, maintaining, and reporting data. With Excel, you can use a form to enter data into a list, filter information, sort records, and automatically generate subtotals. You can use Excel's calculating, formatting, charting, and printing features on your list, too.

In Excel, a list is any group of worksheet data with unique labels in the first row. You don't need to do anything special to identify a list—Excel is smart enough to know one when it sees it. Figure 1, for example, shows the first few rows of a list that Excel can recognize as a database.

Figure 1. The first few rows of a worksheet that Excel can automatically recognize as a list. ...