Today’s blog covers rudimentary
yet important aspects of Excel – worksheet and cell.
Before you start working with Excel, you
need to understand how these concepts are linked. When you open an Excel file,
you would notice a number of worksheets. Each worksheet has number of cells.
You could understand this by an analogy – cells are like houses, worksheets are
blocks or wards and file as a city. Now think of writing a letter (hardly
people write now though!!). You start with residential or office address, i.e.
the address of entity being referenced followed by block , city and so on.
Although we write address in this way, in reality the address is accessed in
opposite manner, i.e. from larger to smaller entity. Same principle is followed
in Excel also. When you refer to a cell from a different file, file name, then
worksheet name and then cell name must be mentioned. Good thing about Excel is
that you don’t have to remember; just click onto the cell and then the address
would be copied. For a cell on same file, but different worksheet, only
worksheet name before cell address is
required.
Talking about cell address which
is as per our analogy the address of house or office, it has to be unique and
easily identifiable. Those who are conversant with Google Map or could remember
geography classes of yore, it will not be difficult to locate a place – it’s
simple the intersection of latitude and longitude, or vertical and horizontal
lines. If you have studied coordinate geometry,
you could also recollect how a point on 2-d plane could be located –
intersection of abscissa (X-axis) and ordinate (Y axis). Similarly any cell in
Excel could be conceived to be the
intersection of horizontal (represented by numbers- 1,2,3 and so on) and vertical
(represented by alphabets -A,B,C and so on; remember these are not case
sensitive, hence a,b,c would suffice). Only difference lies in the order of
representation. In case of coordinate geometry, X axis, i.e. horizontal value
comes first followed by vertical, i.e. Y-axis value. In case of Excel cell
address, vertical i.e. column value in terms of alphabets comes first followed
by horizontal i.e. row value in terms of numbers. This concept seems to be
trivial, but holds great significance in case of absolute referencing to be
discussed later. This is also important while it is imperative to link the
content of a cell, which will be explained though following video.
Hope you have understood the basics of Excel. In my next session, I will discuss the concept of absolute and relative referencing. Until then, you should practice the cell linking with some of your own data.
