Wiley Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Formulas & Functions For Dummies 978-0-470-04655-5 Manuale Utente

In This Chapter

Getting the skinny on workbooks and worksheets

Understanding the parts of a worksheet

Working with cells, ranges, named areas, and tables

Applying formatting

Figuring out how to use the Help system

Writing formulas

Using functions in formulas

Using nested functions

E

xcel is to computer programs what a Ferrari is to cars: sleek on the out-
side and a lot of power under the hood. Excel is also like a truck — it can

handle all your data, lots of it. In fact, in Excel 2007, a single worksheet has
17,179,869,184 places to hold data. Yes, that’s what we said — over 17 billion
data placeholders. And that’s on just one worksheet!

Opening files created in earlier versions of Excel may show just the number
of worksheet rows and columns available in the version the workbook was
created with.

Excel is used in all types of businesses. And you know how that’s possible?
By being able to store and work with any kind of data. It doesn’t matter
whether you’re in finance or sales, whether you run a video store or organize
wilderness trips, or whether you’re charting party RSVPs or tracking the
scores of your favorite sports teams — Excel can handle all of it. Its number-
crunching ability is just awesome! And so easy to use!

Just putting a bunch of information on worksheets doesn’t crunch the data or
give you sums, results, or analyses. If you want to just store your data some-
where, you can use Excel or get a database program instead. In this book, we

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