We're now ready to start creating our workbooks.
As a practice exercise,
let's help Sean, create his expenses for the day.
To begin with we're going to need a new workbook.
To do this we're going to come up to the File tab on our ribbon and click.
Come down on the green panel until you find New
and click and then select blank workbook and again it's a single click.
We now have our blank workbook.
Let's quickly zoom in so we can see what we're doing.
I'm coming down to the zoom slider and just clicking the plus a few times.
You will notice that the first cell A1 has a green box around it.
It is by default the active cell and that
means we can just start typing directly into it.
So I'm going to type expenses and now I could click away but in Excel,
it's better practice to press Tab to jump to the cell to
the right or press enter to jump to the cell below.
This commits the change and moves you down one cell.
We're going to press Enter again to get one more down.
Right. Next thing we're going to type is item,
but now I want to go right,
so press tab and it's gone one cell to the right where I'm going to type cost.
And press Enter.
You'll notice it actually jumps down and back to the first empty cell in the next row.
This makes your data entry very quick and easy.
Right. Sean's first expense was his train, right?
So we're going to type train and press Tab and that costs $6.30.
So I'm just going to put 6.3.
We don't need to worry about putting extra decimal places or the dollar sign,
as we'll look at how we can use formatting tools to do that easily in a later video.
Now click Enter. All right.
Sean also bought a coffee,
so let's put a coffee in and press Tab and that cost $3.50 and then lastly,
he bought some lunch and that cost $12 and enter.
He also bought a juice,
but then he realizes actually he didn't buy that juice today.
That was yesterday.
So now he wants to delete that value from that cell.
Deleting is easy.
Select the cell or cells
where you want to remove the data and press the delete key on your keyboard.
This will not remove the cell,
just the contents of that cell.
Please note, pressing Delete on your keyboard and
using the delete on your ribbon are quite different.
The delete on the ribbon actually removes the cell
and that may cause other data in your spreadsheet to move.
So don't use that unless you actually want to remove the cell itself.
Sean now realizes he actually has made a bit of a mistake.
The train journey didn't cost him $6.30,
but he's going to have to catch the train home again so he wants to double this value.
If you wish to replace the value in a cell,
single click and over type by putting in the new value.
So we're going to put in $12.60 and press enter.
In a situation where you want to modify the contents of the cell you have a few options.
So I'd like train to actually say train ride.
Start by clicking on the cell you want to change,
then you can either come up to the formula bar,
click in the formula bar and type your change.
Now I actually don't want to keep that,
so here's a nice little trick.
If you've started modifying a cell and you don't want to
keep your changes, just press Escape.
You don't need to press Undo,
because you haven't really committed the change until you press Enter.
Now another way you can edit a cell,
is to double-click on it.
You see my cursor is now blinking in the cell and I can type
in my change and again, click Enter.
The keyboard shortcut for double-clicking is to press
F2 and then again if you don't want to make the change press Escape.
Next thing we need to do is type in a date.
So I'm going to come up to cell B1 and I'm going to type in
the current date which is the 12th of the fourth 2017.
Now it's really important when you type dates into Excel that
you use the correct format for your regional settings.
So, in Australia for example,
we type day, followed by month, followed by year.
If I was in the US, I would need to put month and day and year.
Once you finish typing, click Enter.
And you will notice that Excel has actually made
my column wide enough to fit the date which is really handy,
but it doesn't do that for all your data.
So if you decide you want to adjust your column widths,
come up to the top where you have your column letters,
find the little separating line but to the right of the column you
want to make wider and then click and drag.
It is a very bad idea to leave blank columns in the middle of your dataset,
so if you need to,
rather just make your columns a little wider.
Now one last little thing to finish off our expenses,
we need to total them up.
So I'm going to click into B7 and here's a great trick.
We're going to come up to our Home tab on our ribbon and on the far right,
you will see a tool called AutoSum.
We'll look at working with calculations and a lot more detail next week,
but if you just quickly need to add up some numbers you can click on the AutoSum.
You'll see it's added up all the numeric values above
the cell where I originally clicked and then just press Enter.
So that's Sean's expenses complete.
Why don't you now practice at creating your own expenses.
Dr Yvonne BreyerDirector, Learning and Teaching
