Office 2013 All-In-One Absolute Beginner’s Guide

16. Entering Sheet Data

In This Chapter

• Understanding Excel Data Types

• Entering Data

• Editing and Managing Data

Data entry is one of the most important functions in Excel—and one of the most tedious, especially when the data is repetitive. This chapter shows you tricks for copying down data, fixing entered data, and helping your users enter data correctly by providing a predefined list of entries.

Understanding Excel Data Types

It’s important to differentiate types of data because Excel treats each differently. You tell Excel what kind of data is in a cell by how you type it into the cell or by how you format the cell. Data in Excel can fall into one of four categories:

• Numbers—Numeric data that can be used for calculation purposes. ...