Microsoft office excel 2010 wikipedia

Use the Formulas tab to find additional formulas. Use data to create charts. Import data from other sources. Did this summary help you? Yes No. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers. Please log in with your username or email to continue. No account yet? Create an account. Edit this Article. We use cookies to make wikiHow great. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Cookie Settings.

Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article parts. Related Articles. Article Summary. Part 1. Install Microsoft Office if you don't have it. Microsoft Excel isn't available as a standalone program, but it is included in a Microsoft Office package or subscription. Open an existing Excel document.

If you want to open an existing Excel document at any time, simply double-click the document in question. This will bring up the document in an Excel window. Skip this step if you want to open a new document in Excel. Open Excel. Click or double-click the Excel app icon, which resembles a white "X" on a dark-green background. Select a template if necessary. If you want to use an Excel template e. If you just want to open a new blank Excel document, click the Blank option in the upper-left side of the page and then skip the next step.

Click Create. It's to the right of the template's name. Wait for the Excel workbook to open. This will take a few seconds. Once you see the Excel template or blank page, you can proceed with entering your sheet's data. Part 2. Familiarize yourself with the Excel ribbon tabs. In the green "ribbon" at the top of the Excel window, you'll see a series of tabs. Each of these tabs can be used to access different Excel tools; the main ones you'll need to know include the following: Home — Contains options for formatting text, changing cell background color, and so on.

Insert — Contains options for tables, charts, graphs, and equations. Page Layout — Contains options for page margins, orientation, and themes. Formulas — Contains various formula options as well as a function menu. Consider using the top row of cells for headers. When adding data to a blank spreadsheet, you can use the top cell in each column e.

This is helpful when creating graphs or tables which require labels. Select a cell. Click the cell into which you want to enter data. For example, if you're using a budget-planning template, you might click the first empty cell to select it.

Doing so adds it to the cell and moves your selection to the next available cell. Edit your data. To go back and edit data later, click the cell you want to edit, then change whatever you need to change in the text box above the top row of cells. Format text if necessary. If you want to change the way a cell's text is formatted e. You can also use conditional formatting to cause your cells to change based on factors in the spreadsheet e. Part 3. Select a cell for your formula. Click the cell in which you want to create a formula.

Perform basic operations. Add a whole column of numbers. Select a cell for an advanced formula. To use a more advanced formula, you'll use the Insert Function tool. Start by clicking the cell in which you want to display your formula. Click Formulas. It's a tab at the top of the Excel window.

If you purchase a pre-paid subscription, your subscription starts when you activate your subscription and land on your My Account page. You can purchase pre-paid subscriptions from a retailer or reseller, or a Microsoft support agent. If you have an active Microsoft Family subscription, you can share it with up to five members of your household six total. When you use cloud-based services, your IT infrastructure resides off your property off-premises , and is maintained by a third party hosted , instead of residing on a server at your home or business on-premises that you maintain.

With Microsoft , for example, information storage, computation, and software are located and managed remotely on servers owned by Microsoft. Many services you use every day are a part of the cloud—everything from web-based email to mobile banking and online photo storage. Upgrade from Excel to Microsoft Still using Excel ? Do more with your data with Excel in Microsoft See options for home. See options for work. Excel was retired in Get the most up-to-date version of Excel and master your data.

Upgrade to Microsoft today. End of support for Office Shift your business to Microsoft Get a clearer picture of your data Organize, visualize and extract insights from your data more easily than ever with powerful new features.

Collaborate with ease With 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage, you can back up, share and co-author workbooks from any device. Always up to date Get exclusive, new features and security updates available only for Excel in Microsoft Compare Excel and Excel with Microsoft Excel Compare Microsoft Office Product features. Efficient files. Improved toolbar. Flash Fill. Easily reformat, rearrange, and extract information from imported data.

One-click forecasting. Create forecast charts based on existing data and predict future trends with a simple click. Not Included. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications VBA. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms and has been since version 5 in It is bundled as part of Microsoft Office.

Excel is one of the most popular microcomputer applications to date. This promoted development of a new spreadsheet called Excel which started with the intention to, in the words of Doug Klunder, 'do everything does and do it better'.

The first version of Excel was released for the Mac in and the first Windows version numbered 2. Lotus was slow to bring to Windows and by Excel had started to outsell and helped Microsoft achieve the position of leading PC software developer.

This accomplishment, dethroning the king of the software world, solidified Microsoft as a valid competitor and showed its future of developing GUI software. Microsoft pushed its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so. Microsoft Excel 2. Early in its life Excel became the target of a trademark lawsuit by another company already selling a software package named "Excel" in the finance industry.

As the result of the dispute Microsoft was required to refer to the program as "Microsoft Excel" in all of its formal press releases and legal documents. However, over time this practice has been ignored, and Microsoft cleared up the issue permanently when they purchased the trademark of the other program. Microsoft also encouraged the use of the letters XL as shorthand for the program; while this is no longer common, the program's icon on Windows still consists of a stylized combination of the two letters, and the file extension of the default Excel format is.

Excel offers many user interface tweaks over the earliest electronic spreadsheets; however, the essence remains the same as in the original spreadsheet, VisiCalc : the cells are organized in rows and columns, and contain data or formulas with relative or absolute references to other cells. Excel was the first spreadsheet that allowed the user to define the appearance of spreadsheets fonts, character attributes and cell appearance. It also introduced intelligent cell recomputation, where only cells dependent on the cell being modified are updated previous spreadsheet programs recomputed everything all the time or waited for a specific user command.

Excel has extensive graphing capabilities. VBA is a powerful addition to the application which, in later versions, includes a fully featured integrated development environment IDE. Macro recording can produce VBA code replicating user actions, thus allowing simple automation of regular tasks. VBA allows the creation of forms and in-worksheet controls to communicate with the user. The language supports use but not creation of ActiveX COM DLL 's; later versions add support for class modules allowing the use of basic object-oriented programming techniques.