CHAPTER 1- Introduction to Spreadsheet

SPREAD SHEET

Introduction to  Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a grid (system of numbered squares for map references) that organizes data into columns and rows, on which information can be sorted in ascending or descending order. Spreadsheet allows one to easily display information and insert formulas to work with data.

Types of spreadsheets include the manual and the electronic spreadsheets. The manual one is drafted manually in large books ruled into columns and rows. Electronic spreadsheets are basically three; the Microsoft Excel, Lotus1‐2‐3, Quarto Professional, others include Informix etc.

Spreadsheet have become an indispensable part of industries and businesses for a lot of reasons;

1. It is designed to help manage and control information flow.
2. It can be used as an electronic file cabinet
3. It enhances communication within an organization
4. It can combine graphic and some word processing capabilities
5. It is wide and spacious enough to accept large volumes of data that big corporations generate
6. It can accept numerical data and carry out some logical processing.
7. It can perform some tedious, repetitive and time consuming logical operations within seconds.

THE MICROSOFT EXCEL

The success of the windows OS in the market has aided the popularity of the Excel spreadsheet in households and firms (both large and small), to an extent that major competition like APPLE had to integrate it into their OS.

Excel has 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows depending on the version of the software you are using. As mentioned earlier will be using EXCEL 2016 version fro the sake of our lecture, but chrome users can use the google spreadsheet from google apps the intersection of the column (vertical axis) and row (horizontal axis) is called a CELL, which is the location where data is entered to. A column is identified is by letter and a row is identified by numbers, hence a cell will have a name such as A1.

In the excel window leftmost column and the topmost row often are reserved for descriptive labels that identify the value stored in each of the cells in the grid. The rightmost column and lower rows of a set of figures are often set aside for row and column totals respectively.

Definition of Terms

• a CELL refers to the location of data. It is activated by placing the mouse cursor on it or by navigation keys.
• a RANGE  is the sequence of cells e.g. A1 to A7
• Labels are text entries of other cells
• Values are numeric information, most numbers
• FORMULAS refers to values designed to manipulate data in cells that contain values
• FUNCTIONS are in built formulas in excel, which helps in data manipulations e.g. =SUM (B4:G4), which adds all cells starting with B4 and ending with G4.
• ADD-INGS are specially designed packages which perform specific functions, to enhance the spreadsheet functions Excel has some in built plug-ins, which must be activated to make use of them. Others can be downloaded and installed online. Examples of plug-ins includes Power view, analysis toolpak, Euro currency tools etc. which are readily installed to excel.

This is the end of the first chapter, kindly leave comments below for your question and share with friends. In the next chapter we shall start with formulas in spreadsheet