Excel 365 for Beginners: Excel 365 Essentials, #1

ALSO BY M.L. HUMPHREY

Listing of all books by M.L. Humphrey

Excel 365 Essentials

Excel 365 for Beginners

Intermediate Excel 365

102 Useful Excel 365 Functions

Excel Essentials

Excel for Beginners

Intermediate Excel

50 Useful Excel Functions

50 More Excel Functions

Excel Essentials 2019

Excel 2019 Beginner

Excel 2019 Intermediate

Excel 2019 Formulas & Functions

EXCEL 365 FOR BEGINNERS

EXCEL 365 ESSENTIALS - BOOK 1

M.L. HUMPHREY

CONTENTS

Why Learn Excel

Discussion of Different Office Versions

What This Book Covers

Appearance Settings

Basic Terminology

Absolute Basics

Navigating Excel

Input Data

Copy, Paste, and Move Data

Formulas and Functions

Formatting

Sorting and Filtering

Printing

Conclusion

Shortcuts

About the Author

Copyright

WHY LEARN EXCEL

Excel is great. I use it both in my professional life and my personal life. It allows me to organize and track key information in a quick and easy manner and to automate a lot of the calculations I need.

I have a budget worksheet that I look at at least every few days to track whether my bills have been paid and how much I need to keep in my bank account and just where I am overall financially.

(Which I shared in Excel for Budgeting and which you can also purchase a blank version of via my Payhip store if you’re interested. Links available at https://mlhumphrey.com/business-and-personal-finance/)

In my professional career I’ve used Excel in a number of ways, from analyzing a series of financial transactions to see if a customer was overcharged to performing a comparison of regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

It’s also the quickest and easiest way I’ve ever found to take rows of raw data and create summaries of that data.

While Excel works best for storing numbers and performing calculations, it is also often a good choice for text-based analysis, especially if you want to be able to sort your text results or filter out and isolate certain entries.

Excel also has very widespread usage. Every single corporate environment I ever worked in used Microsoft Office. I was in banking, finance, and consulting and all of those fields tend to default to Microsoft Office products.

More creative fields tend more towards Apple products, but your bread and butter corporations are very much still users of Office. So learning Excel (and Word and PowerPoint) is an essential skill if you want to be employed in those types of companies.

At least for the foreseeable future. Big companies do not like change.

And honestly, the skills you learn using Microsoft Excel can be applied to similar programs. I use Numbers on my Mac when I need to open a spreadsheet and other than remembering to do Command instead of Control for my shortcuts they work much the same way.

So Excel is definitely worth learning. It will help you with your own life and your career.

Now, real quick, I want to discuss the three main versions of Microsoft Office so you understand where this book fits.

DISCUSSION OF DIFFERENT OFFICE VERSIONS

At this present moment (December 2022), Microsoft Office offers essentially three products that all share the same core functionality.

There is a free version of Microsoft Office that is available online. You can get access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and a number of other Microsoft tools by signing up for a free Microsoft account.

We’ll call this one Office on the Web.

It has basic functionality that will work for most users, I suspect. But it’s also all online. If you have a file on your computer and want to work with it in the free version you have to upload it and store it in a OneDrive account. It also has limited functionality, so it’s not going to give you the full range of options as the paid products that Microsoft offers.

Second, are the old-school versions. That’s what I have spent the last thirty years or so using. These are static versions of Office that are locked into place at a point in time.

As I write this, the latest static, or as Microsoft likes to call them, on premise, version of Microsoft Office is Office 2021. The original Office Essentials books I wrote used Office 2013 and I also published a series of titles on Office 2019, but there have been many other versions of Office over the years.

Each of the static versions of Office are released with Office functionality as it exists at that time. They’re not supposed to update if there are improvements made later.

(Although I’ve noticed that they have language about making updates and that sometimes they do seem to make updates, perhaps for security reasons, because I will sometimes notice that my old familiar program isn’t working the way it used to.)

But the appearance and tasks do seem to stay fixed.

For example, they changed the appearance of Office with the release of Office 2021, but neither of my laptops, one running Office 2013 and one running Office 2019, were impacted. Also, with Office 2021 it looks like they released the function XLOOKUP to replace VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP, but I didn’t get access to it.

One of the disadvantages of working with one of the static or on premise versions of Office is that you don’t get future improvements like that.

You also, because Microsoft really wants to push people towards their subscription model, are generally limited to having that static version on only one computer. If that computer dies, oh well, you have to buy it again for the next computer. You can’t transfer it.

(Again, that’s what they say, but when I logged onto my new laptop with my Microsoft account they were ready to let me use Office 2019 on it even though I’d bought it for my old computer. So maybe it’s more one computer at a time even though that is not what the license says.)

The advantage to the static versions, though, and the reason I like them, is that they are stable. I buy Office 2019, I figure out how it works, and I’m done until my computer dies.

I don’t have to worry that I log in and they’ve changed things on me overnight. I am not a user who is on the cutting edge who needs the latest and greatest. And I don’t collaborate which is where a lot of their more recent improvements seem to be focused so the changes they are making are generally ones that I don’t need.

I just want things to stay the same so I don’t have to think about anything when I’m ready to work.

Also, I like the static versions because I pay my $300 (or whatever the cost is at the time) once and never have to pay again or worry about losing the ability to edit my files.

But there are good reasons to use the third product option, Office 365, which is the subscription version of Office and the subject of this book.

One is that you can have access to Office across multiple devices. I have a few laptops and having Office 365, if I buy the right option, lets me have Office on my Mac as well as all of my laptops for one monthly fee.

If you’re part of a family who all need access that can be a much cheaper option than paying to put Office on each computer.

Also, if everyone is using Office 365 then you know that everyone will be on the same page in terms of compatibility. One of the issues that I ran into professionally a number of years ago was that I was using a newer version of Office than one of my clients. I designed an entire workbook for them that did very complex calculations only to find out that they couldn’t use the workbook because the Excel functions I relied on weren’t available in the version of Office they were using. I had to redo the whole thing because they couldn’t upgrade.

(Of course, that means that if you are going to use Office 365 or even Office 2021, and you’re working with someone outside of your organization, you need to be very careful that you don’t use something available to you (like XLOOKUP or TEXTJOIN) that that person can’t use because they’re using an older version of Office.)

Office 365 can also be far more portable if you’re willing to put files on OneDrive. (I am not, because I’m a Luddite at heart.) But with Office 365 you can save your files to the cloud and then access them from your other devices.

Also, it can maybe be a much cheaper option for certain programs. I use Microsoft Access and to add that on to a Microsoft 2021 purchase was going to be a couple hundred dollars. But with Office 365 I can have Access along with everything else I need for, at the moment, $8.25 a month. (Go to the business licenses if you need this.)

It also spaces out the cost of the product. You don’t have to plunk down all that money on Day 1. But overall Office 365 is probably more expensive for a single user on a single computer than just buying the product with a one-time fee. My laptop that’s running Office 2013 is now five years old. If I were paying $8.25 a month I’d have spent $495 which I think is more than I paid up front. And (knock wood) that computer is still going strong.

So it’s all about what trade offs you want to make.

To summarize.

There are technically three current versions of Office: (a) the free online one, (b) the static version, the most recent of which is currently Office 2021, and (c) the constantly updating version which is called Office 365.

At the beginner level the differences between the various version should not be significant.

WHAT THIS BOOK COVERS

Let’s talk now about what you will learn in this book, because Excel is an incredibly complex and powerful tool, but it can also get a little overwhelming if you try to cover everything in one go.

So what I’ve done with the various Excel Essentials series is break that information on Excel down into digestible chunks. And I think I’ve succeeded at that. (At this point the original Excel for Beginners book, which was written for Excel 2013, has over a thousand ratings on Amazon and a rating average of 4.2, so people are generally happy with the level of information covered.)

This book is a version of that book but written for Excel 365. It focuses on the basics of using Excel. We’ll cover how to navigate Excel, input data, format it, manipulate it through basic math formulas, filter it, sort it, and print your results.

That should be 95% of what you need to do in Excel day-to-day if you’re an average user. I’ll also cover at the end how to fill in that last 5% on your own.

(But if you want to keep going with me from there, then there’s Intermediate Excel 365 and 102 Useful Excel 365 Functions which I’ll discuss in a little more detail at the end.)

The other nice thing about Excel is that there are a number of ways to perform the same task. While I do strongly encourage you to learn the control shortcuts (like Ctrl + C to copy) that I mention throughout this book, there will usually be two or three or even more ways to perform a task that we’ll cover. So