Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 12: basic excel 453

9. Click cell B4, January 1998. Enter a figure for your January income.

You didn’t make much money in January, and the first year was slow, so you

were living off credit cards at the time; $250 might be about right. Leave off the

dollar sign—just type 250.

10. Press Return (or the down arrow key).

Excel moves the active cell frame to the next row down.

11. Type another number to represent your income for February; press Return.

Repeat steps 9 and 10 until you get to the bottom of the 1998 column.

For this experiment, the exact numbers to type don’t much matter, but Figure

12-12 shows one suggestion.

12. Click in the January 1999 column (C4); fill in the numbers for each month,

pressing Return after each entry. Repeat with the other years.

Remember to type extremely high numbers in the 1999 and 2000 columns (when

venture capitalists poured money into your company), and equally huge nega-

tive numbers (each preceded by a minus sign) for the 2001 column, as the tech-

nology recession hit. Increase the numbers again in 2002, since business picked

up once your advertisers realized that you weren’t going down with the dot-com

ship—not yet anyway.

You’ve successfully populated your spreadsheet with data; choose File→Save to

preserve and name the document. You’ll return to it later in this chapter—after

you’ve read about what Excel can do with all of these numbers.

Formula Fundamentals

Without formulas, Excel would be just glorified graph paper. With them, Excel be-

comes a number-crunching powerhouse worthy of having its own agent. Excel for-

mulas do everything from basic arithmetic to complex financial analysis. You can

Figure 12-12:

You can make the

headings stand out from

the data you’ll soon put in

the cells by changing the

font style and alignment

(see Chapter 13). In this

example, you’ve finished

typing in the numbers, as

described in steps 9

through 12.

Spreadsheet Basics

454 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

even use formulas to switch the capitalization of text, remove all nonprintable char-

acters from a text string, and probably vacuum the living room.

Basic Calculations

A formula in a cell can perform calculations on other cells’ contents. For example, if

cell A1 contains the number of hours in a day, and cell A2 contains the number of

days in a year, then you could type =A1*A2 into cell B3 to find out how many hours

there are in a year. (In spreadsheet lingo, you’d say that this formula returns the

number 8670.)

After typing the formula and pressing Enter, you’d see only the mathematical an-

swer in cell B3; the formula itself is hidden, though you can see it in the Formula bar

if you click the cell again (see the extreme example in Figure 12-13).

Tip: Your formulas don’t have to remain invisible until clicked. To reveal formulas on a given sheet, press

Control-‘ (the key in the upper-left corner of most keyboards). This command toggles the spreadsheet

cells so that they show formulas instead of results. (Excel widens your columns considerably, as necessary,

to show the formulas.) To switch things back to the way they were, press Control-‘ again.

You can consider that keystroke a shortcut for the official way to bring formulas into view: Choose

Excel→Preferences→View panel. Under Window options, click Formulas; click OK. Repeat the procedure

to restore the results-only view.

Formulas do math on values. A value is any number, date, time, text, or cell address

that you feed into a formula. The math depends on the operators in the formula—

symbols like + for addition, – for subtraction, / for division, * for multiplication,

and so on.

To enter a simple formula that you know well, just select the cell and then click the

Edit box in the Formula bar, which is shown in Figure 12-1. The cursor appears

simultaneously in the cell and in the Edit box, signaling that Excel awaits your next

move.

Your next move is to type an equal sign (=), since every formula starts with one (see

Figure 12-13). Then type the rest of the formula using values and operators. When

you want to incorporate a reference to a particular cell in your formula, you don’t

actually have to type out B12 or whatever—just click the cell in question.

Figure 12-13:

A fairly complex formula may

be hiding behind a simple

cell display.

Formula

Fundamentals