Basics

If you're looking to learn Excel from scratch, or you have a basic understanding but need help to develop your Excel skills, you're in the right place. This page lists a series of lessons and tutorials that have been designed to help you get started with Excel so you can start to use it more effectively. Each lesson should take around five minutes to complete, and sometimes less. So you can come back here regularly and get better and smarter with Excel every time.

In this lesson, we cover how to print an Excel spreadsheet with page numbers on each page. Excel has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that hasn't changed is the way that you insert page numbers into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, Excel 2010 does not make it easy to find the options for doing this. This lesson covers the basics of inserting page numbers as well as providing an overview of some more advanced options.

Create a PDF from Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any Microsoft Office document

Microsoft Excel

Basics

If you need a free option to create a PDF of a Microsoft Office document, your options will depend on which version of Microsoft Office you are using.

Copying formatting from one cell to another using Format Painter

Microsoft Excel

Basics

If you have formatted a cell and want to use the same formatting for another cell or cells, you can easily copy the formatting from that cell to as many additional cells as you like.

Absolute and relative references in Excel

Microsoft Excel

Basics

When you create a formula in Excel that refers to other cells in the worksheet, Excel will store the information about those cells as relative references. Relative references and their counterpart, absolute references, are one of the things that make spreadsheets such a powerful tool.

Use the SUM function to add up a column or row of cells in Excel

Microsoft Excel

Basics

There are a variety of ways to add up the numbers found in two or more cells in Excel. This lesson shows you how to use the SUM function to add up cells, rows and columns of cells in Excel.

Calculating the current date and time in an Excel spreadsheet

Microsoft Excel

Basics

Excel Formulas and Functions

There are many scenarios where you may need to use the current date and time in your spreadsheets. You may simply need to display the current date in a spreadsheet report. Or, you may need to perform a calculation that uses the current date or time. This lesson shows you how to enter a formula into a cell in Excel that outputs the current date and/or time, and updates automatically as time passes.

Use the keyboard to move between worksheets in a workbook

Microsoft Excel

Basics

Clever Excel Tricks

One of the last keyboard shortcuts I mastered in Excel was moving between worksheets. Fortunately it's easy, and you don't need to wait as long as I did.

Select cells quickly and easily in Excel using the keyboard instead of the mouse

Microsoft Excel

Basics

Clever Excel Tricks

Once you get used to using Excel, you can find that using the mouse to select data in your spreadsheet is somewhat slow and time consuming. Here's a quick technique for selecting a range of cells in Excel.

Scale your spreadsheet to fit on one page when printing from Excel

Microsoft Excel

Basics

Excel Printing

Printing from Excel can be very frustrating, especially if your spreadsheet is too wide or too tall to fit on a single page.

You can use the Scaling option in Page Setup to set limits on how many pages wide and tall your document should be when you print it. The problem with that is that you can find your page fits onto one page, but becomes too small to read. Not only that, but Excel ignores any manual page breaks you've entered. This lesson explains how you can print your spreadsheet so it automatically scales to be one page wide without forcing the rows into a single page.

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