Basics of Excel - File, Worksheet, Cell

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.