How to Make a Microsoft Excel Sheet

It was well known that the respective Spreadsheet is a grid-based file designed to organize the information and manage any personal or business data calculation. Spreadsheets play a significant role in maintaining an extensive database with Microsoft Excel. People all around the world make use of spreadsheets to create tables for any personal or business need.

Spreadsheets are efficiently available in Microsoft Office and Office 365, from where a user can easily create a spreadsheet. Here Microsoft Office is an on-premise application, whereas Office 365 is primarily based on the cloud.

Over 400 functions and features like pivot, coloring, graph, chart, conditional formatting, and many more exist. This makes it the best choice for users to use for various purposes.

The workbook is the Excel lingo for 'spreadsheet.' Microsoft Excel uses this term to emphasize that a single workbook can contain multiple worksheets where each can have its own data grid, chart, and graph.

However, spreadsheets have grown from simple grids to powerful tools, functioning like databases or apps that usually perform numerous calculations on a single sheet. And we can also use a spreadsheet to determine our mortgage payments over time or calculate the depreciation of assets and how it will affect our business's taxes.

Besides all this, we can combine data between the several sheets and visualize it in color-coded tables for an understanding. With all the new functionality, a spreadsheet program can be intimidating for new users.

Key Features of Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

When we open the Microsoft Excel worksheet screen, then we can see the following features:

1. Basic App Functions

From left to right, along with this top green banner, we will find the icons, such as: reopening the Create a Workbook page; saving our work; undoing the last action performed, and then displaying which actions were recorded. Redo a step that has been undone and select more tools as well.

2. Ribbon

And in the Ribbon, we have several tabs to work with them. This grey area is called the Ribbon and contains tools to enter, manipulate, and visualize the data.

Some tabs usually focus on specific features, and by default, home is selected. Click on the Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data, Review, or View tabs to reveal a set of tools unique to each tab.

3. Formula Bar

The formula bar in Microsoft Excel is the platform that can be used to view the formula or the selected cell or active cell's value.

For example: If the A1 cell is selected and we have a value in cell A1, then in that case, we can see the same value in the formula bar.

4. Column Header

As we can easily see, each respective column has its heading, with the alphabet characters representing each column separately.

5. Row Header

In this, the respective Alphabets represent the column headers, and similarly, row headers are represented by the numbers starting from 1. In recent versions of Microsoft Excel, we have more than 1 million rows respectively.

6. Spreadsheet Area

By default, the work area is a grid, this is the place where we do the work, and the combination of the column and row forms a cell, i.e., a rectangular box.

Moreover, each cell was identified by a unique cell address consisting of a column header followed by a row header. The column header is A for the first cell, and the row header is 1, so the first cell address is A1 effectively.

7. Sheet Tabs

This is where we can easily find the different sheets in our workbook. Each sheet gets its tab, which we can name ourselves, which can help separate the data so that one sheet doesn't get too vast.

For example, We might have an annual budget where each month is a column, and each row is a type of expense. Instead of keeping it yearly, we need to track it on one of the sheets and scroll horizontally. We can also make each tab a different year containing 12 months only.

8. View Options

The left icon is Normal, which depicts the worksheet as it appears in the image above. The middle icon is Page Layout, which divides our worksheet into pages resembling how it would look when printed, with the option to add headers. And the right icon usually represents a Page Break Preview, in which we can easily adjust where the page breaks are by just clicking and dragging them.

The slider with the "-" and "+" is for scale or zoom level. Drag the slider left or right to zoom in or out as well.

This is the general overview of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Now we will see how to work with this Spreadsheet effectively.

How to Create a Spreadsheet?

We want to create a spreadsheet to calculate a simple sale sheet for the various products in different quarters. And we have some products and each product sales in each quarter for the year 2020. Here are the following steps to create a report easily in Microsoft Excel effectively:

Step 1: First of all, we are required to Open MS Excel in our system.

Step 2: Afterward, we must go to the Menu and select the New button.

Step 3: Then, we will click on the Blank workbook to create a simple worksheet.

Or else we can use the shortcut key and press Ctrl + N to create a new workbook or Spreadsheet.

Step 4: A workbook is the document's name containing our spreadsheets.

Step 5: This will create a blank spreadsheet called Sheet1, which we can see on the tab at the bottom.

Step 6: After that, we need to go to the spreadsheet work area.

Step 7: Create headers for the Sales in each quarter in the first row by just merging the cells from B1 to D1, and in row 2, give the product name and each quarter's name as depicted below, respectively.

Step 8: We must enter the product name in the Product Name column.

Step 9: We must also provide the sales data for each quarter in front of every product.

Step 10: In the next row, we will put one header for Total and calculate each quarter's total sales.

Step 11: Now, we will calculate the Total for each quarter by applying the summation function. Apply the functions in cells B13, C13, and D13 as well.

One of Excel's most useful features is its ability to look up data and perform calculations based on mathematical formulas.

Formulas always begin with an equal (=) sign followed by the function name (e.g., =SUM). After that, the parameters should be entered between parentheses (). Follow these steps to auto-insert a Sum function for each quarter's sales in Microsoft Excel:

Click on the Formulas tab at the top of the screen.
And we can see several icons in the toolbar at the top of the panel's application labeled "Function Library."
Select the B13 cell.
And finally, click on the AutoSum icon in the function library.

Step 12: The sum function will then quickly calculate each quarter's Total.

Step 13: Let us now convert the ($) currency symbol's sales value by clicking the $ button in the Excel ribbon.

Step 14: Now, create a Result Table with each quarter's total sales of the products.

Step 15: Now plot the pie chart to represent the client's data in a professional way that looks easy to understand.

Select the result table.
Click on the Insert tab in the Ribbon of Excel.
Again click on the Pie chart icon.

A pie chart creates a simple visualization and how the table is set up. The chart will be titled "Sales in Each Quarter," each dollar amount will appear as a percent of the pie chart with the necessary label.

Step 16: Save our file when we have completed our report. To save the file,

Click on the File menu at the top-left corner as well.

And then select the Save As button. Depending on our version of Microsoft Excel, we will usually choose to save the file to our computer.

Now choose the file location where we want to save our report on our computer.

And click on the Save option.

This is the basic level introduction to Excel Spreadsheet. Excel has a wide variety of tools to work with.

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