Microsoft® Office 2008 for Mac® Bible

Chapter 12. Excel Basics

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Inserting charts

• Working with workbooks

• Using views

• Setting workbook properties

• Protecting your data

Ever since spreadsheet applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 took the office world by storm in the early days of the PC, they have been one of the cornerstones of the modern office. Microsoft Excel, to be sure, is far and away the most popular spreadsheet software in existence. Excel is a whiz with numbers, allowing you to build workbooks with many worksheet pages organized in rows and columns. Individual cells in a worksheet can contain numbers, text, or complex formulas to calculate values. Excel goes way beyond number crunching prowess, however, by allowing you to integrate data from databases, generate charts and graphs, collaborate with others, and customize the look and feel of your worksheets to tailor them for specific tasks.

Microsoft Excel started on the Mac and has evolved to keep up with its Windows cousin. If you are new to Excel 2008, this chapter gives you an introduction to the application, including a tour of the various elements that make up the user interface. You learn how to open workbooks, add and delete individual spreadsheets called worksheets to a workbook, apply templates to a workbook, and save them. In addition, you learn how to work with views and create custom views. Finally, you learn how you can protect the data contained in your workbooks.

Navigating the Excel Window

As with the other Office 2008 programs, Excel 2008 provides ...