1. …and were too afraid to not ask because you didn’t care in the first place.

2.  First and foremost, Excel is a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet is defined as: ◦ An electronic document in which data is arranged in the rows and columns of a grid and can be manipulated and used in calculations.  To summarize, Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet.  Whoo, this is easy.

3.  Your standard excel spreadsheet, Born screaming with nothing to show for itself but its naked glory, looks like this:

4.  The letters spanning the top of the document are your columns, running from A to infinity horizontally. Yes, infinitely. If you get to Z, it starts again as AA, AB, and so on until you go cross-eyed trying to find the end of it and give up.  The numbers spanning from 1 to Infinity and going down vertically, those are your rows.

6.  Where any row or columns intersect, they make a cell.  Cells are named from the parents that spawned them at their intersection. ◦ Man, writing that sounded wrong. Like these poor cells parents were bored in traffic.

7.  Cell Data can be a variety of things, not just numbers.  Depending on how the cell is formatted, it can display the same thing in different ways.  For instance, with a single number of 8675309…

9.  Every time we change the cell format, it changes that cell contents slightly. With certain other format settings, we can do even more with the program.  Date and time can automatically convert into dates and times (obviously, duh) but this is useful for tracking hours, as hours can mean payroll.

10.  In the following brief example, I typed in 3/15 and 3:45. The first cell is formatted for dates, the second for time.

11.  The bread and butter, the meat and potatoes, the number one hands down best thing EVAR in Excel is…  Wait for it…

13.  =SUM()  =SUM() is a formula command you can put into any cell to tell it to make calculations. I can add one, or many cells together.  Even though it says SUM, it does more than add. It can do any of the 4 major mathematical operations ◦ That’s Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide for you art folks

14.  In the following demonstration, I’ve generated a genuinely awful set of data statistics on how much Pizza I’ve eaten in one year.  But I want to know, every time I ate pizza, how many slices I’ve eaten, and how much (what percent) of the pie did I eat?  There’s 8 slices in a standard pie so whatever I ate, I’ll divide that by 8 and that’s my percentage of pizza pie consumed by my fat lonely self.

16. This cell (C2) must be able to divide (B2) by 8

17. With (C2) selected, we come up here to enter our formula

18. Doing it this way, using B2 in your formula, means that B2 can change values and the formula still works. Some of you will ultimately try to put in a formula that says =SUM(6/8) And that’s terrible. Once you press the checkmark, you can copy this formula and it should update for every field you paste it into.

19. Behold the statistical proof of my fatness! (BTW I rarely eat pizza, please don’t judge me unnecessarily) We’re missing something though. We need this data to be, you know, percentages.

22. What the *&^% happened on April 20 th ?!

23.  Possibly my most favorite thing in Excel is Conditional formatting, which assigns formatting to cells based on their values.  For instance, in our Pizza demonstration, it can show via color coding which days of sad gluttony were the least damaging to my body, color coding extremely fatty days in red and the least fatty days in green.

26. Oy, what’s this here?

27. The second option highlighted in color scales formats from red to green, setting the highest values to red and the lowest to green, like a golf score. You can layer one on top of the other, too. See Data Bars? We can have both. Data bars on top of Color Scales. Small steps bro, small steps…

29.  To make custom rules, you have excel color-code things based on very specific criteria.  We’ll have to learn together how this works on Mac, because I’m about to show you on Windows and who the *%^& knows if it’s the same process on Mac.  As we begin, let’s create some basic data.

31.  I would like to do a basic color-code rule where if I am par (that’s 0) or lower, I’m green. If I’m 1 or higher, I’m going to code it red.  How do we do this?  First, select your scores then back we go to…