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01 · Excel Fundamentals

Excel organizes everything around three nested containers: a workbook (the file) holds one or more worksheets (tabs), and each worksheet is a grid of cells addressed by column letter and row number (e.g. B3). Every lesson in this track builds on being fluent with that grid — selecting it, naming pieces of it, and moving around it quickly. This module also introduces the worked dataset used across the rest of Level 1: a small personal budget.

1. Workbooks, worksheets, and the ribbon

  1. Open Excel and choose Blank workbook. A new file starts with one worksheet tab (usually named Sheet1) at the bottom-left of the window.
  2. Add a worksheet with the + button next to the last tab, or right-click any tab and choose Insert. Rename a tab by double-clicking it; reorder tabs by dragging them left or right.
  3. The ribbon (top of the window) is organized into tabs — Home, Insert, Formulas, Data, Review, View, and more — each holding grouped commands. Home covers formatting and basic editing; Formulas and Data are where most of this course lives.
  4. The Name Box (top-left, above column A) shows the address of the currently selected cell or range, and can be typed into to jump straight to any address — type B3 and press Enter to select cell B3 instantly.
  5. The Formula Bar (next to the Name Box) shows the actual content of the selected cell — a typed value, or the formula that produces a calculated value — even when the cell itself displays a formatted result.

2. Cells, addresses, and ranges

  1. A single cell is addressed as ColumnLetter + RowNumber — A1 is the top-left cell, C5 is column C, row 5.
  2. A range is a rectangular block of cells written as TopLeft:BottomRight — A1:A5 is five cells stacked in column A; A1:C5 is a 3-column-by-5-row block.
  3. Select a range by clicking one corner cell and dragging to the opposite corner, or click the first cell and Shift+click the last cell. Ctrl/⌘-click additional cells or ranges to select several non-adjacent pieces at once.
  4. Ctrl/⌘+Arrow jumps to the edge of the current block of data in that direction — the fastest way to move across a large sheet without scrolling. Ctrl/⌘+Shift+Arrow does the same while extending the selection.
  5. Select an entire row by clicking its row number, or an entire column by clicking its column letter; click the small triangle at the top-left corner of the grid (where row and column headers meet) to select the whole sheet.

3. Entering and editing data

  1. Click a cell and start typing to enter a value; press Enter to confirm and move down, Tab to confirm and move right, or Esc to cancel the edit.
  2. Double-click a cell (or select it and press F2) to edit its existing content in place, with the cursor positioned inside the cell rather than overwriting it.
  3. Excel auto-detects the type of what you type: 1200 becomes a number (right-aligned by default), Rent becomes text (left-aligned), and 1/15/2026-style entries become dates — the alignment is a fast visual check that a column contains what you expect.
  4. Fill handle — the small square at the bottom-right corner of a selected cell or range. Drag it down or across to copy a formula or continue a pattern (typing Jan and Feb in two cells, then dragging the fill handle across, continues Mar, Apr, …).
  5. Undo (Ctrl/⌘+Z) and Redo (Ctrl/⌘+Y, or ⌘+Shift+Z on Mac) are available for essentially every action, including formatting.

4. Building the Level 1 worked example: a personal budget

Every module in this level reuses the same small dataset so the numbers stay familiar as the functions get more advanced. Build it now:

  1. On Sheet1, enter this exactly, starting at cell A1:
A B C
1 Category Budgeted Actual
2 Rent 1200 1200
3 Groceries 400 455
4 Transport 150 130
5 Entertainment 100 175
6 Savings 300 300
  1. Rename the sheet tab to Budget (double-click the tab, type the name, press Enter) — later modules will refer back to this sheet by name.
  2. Row 1 is a header row — labels describing each column, not data itself. Almost every Excel feature (Tables in Module 4, PivotTables in Module 8) assumes the first row of a data range is headers.
  3. Select A1:C6 and check the Name Box confirms the range, then look at the Formula Bar as you click through a few individual cells — confirm B2 shows 1200 and A1 shows Category.

Why Actual isn't identical to Budgeted

Real budgets rarely match exactly — you'll compute the gap between columns B and C with formulas starting in Module 2, and use that gap to drive conditional formatting (Module 3) and IF-based status logic (Module 7).

5. Saving and file formats

  1. File > Save (⌘/Ctrl+S) the first time prompts for a location and filename; save this as budget-tracker.xlsx.
  2. .xlsx is Excel's standard modern format. .xlsm is the same format with macros enabled (relevant from Level 2 Module 9 onward) — Excel will refuse to save macro code into a plain .xlsx file.
  3. File > Save As lets you export to other formats — .csv (plain comma-separated values, no formatting or formulas, just the visible values) is common for exporting data to other tools; .pdf is common for sharing a formatted, non-editable snapshot.
  4. Excel autosaves periodically to a recovery file even before you save manually — File > Info > Manage Workbook shows any recovered versions if Excel or your computer crashes mid-edit.

Cheat sheet

Action Shortcut
New workbook Ctrl/⌘+N
Save Ctrl/⌘+S
Edit active cell in place F2
Jump to edge of data block Ctrl/⌘+Arrow
Extend selection to edge of data block Ctrl/⌘+Shift+Arrow
Select entire sheet Ctrl/⌘+A (or corner triangle)
Undo / Redo Ctrl/⌘+Z / Ctrl/⌘+Y (⌘+Shift+Z on Mac)
Confirm entry, move down Enter
Confirm entry, move right Tab
Cancel entry Esc

How It Actually Works

Every cell in a worksheet is a node in an in-memory dependency graph, not just a spot in a grid. When you type a plain value like 1200 into B2, Excel stores it in a sparse internal table keyed by (sheet, row, column) — empty cells cost effectively nothing, which is why a workbook with data only in the top-left corner of a million-row sheet stays small on disk. The .xlsx format itself is a zip archive of XML parts: unzip one and you'll find xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml (cell values and formulas), xl/styles.xml (formatting), and xl/sharedStrings.xml — Excel deduplicates every text string across the whole workbook into one shared table and each cell just stores an integer index into it, which is why files with lots of repeated text compress far better than files with lots of unique numbers. The Name Box and Formula Bar are two views onto the same underlying cell object: the Formula Bar always renders the cell's raw content (literal or formula string), while the grid renders its cached display value run through the cell's number format — this split is exactly why 01/15/2026 typed into a cell is stored internally as the serial number 46037 (days since 1899-12-30) with a date format mask applied on top, not as text.

Exercise

Create a new workbook. Build the 5-category budget table from Section 4 exactly as shown (Category, Budgeted, Actual). Rename the sheet tab to Budget. Add a sixth category row of your own choosing with a Budgeted and Actual value, then use the Name Box to jump to cell A1, then to C7 (or whatever row your new category landed on), confirming the Formula Bar shows the correct content each time. Save the file as budget-tracker.xlsx — you'll keep building on this same file through Module 10.