You want to use Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 to store and analyze data for your organization, but you're new to Excel and it's hard to know where to begin. In order to take advantage of everything Excel has to offer, you must first understand the "lay of the land." How do you interact with Excel? What, exactly, can it do? How do you get Excel to do these things for you? It is precisely these types of questions this lesson aims to answer. Like many Microsoft Office applications, Excel has a standard layout that provides you with access to all of the commands, work areas, options, and settings you will need to begin developing and using electronic worksheets in your day-to-day life. Taking the time to become familiar with Excel's layout, its various parts, its commands, and its terminology is a critical first step toward your goal of storing and analyzing organizational data.

The true power of Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 lies in its ability to help you analyze your organizational data. Excel contains an incredible array of functionality to help you do this, particularly when it comes to working with numerical data. In order to take full advantage of Excel's abilities to quickly, efficiently, and accurately calculate data, you must first understand how Excel "thinks," and how to tell it what to do. In this lesson, you'll do just that.

From time to time, you'll need to make changes to your worksheets and workbooks. What if the changes you need to make go beyond simply re-entering a formula or updating a value? What if you need to add a whole new column or row to your worksheet? What if that column or row is in the middle of existing data? Also, what if you discover you've made the same mistake over and over? Or, what if you need to check your spelling throughout all worksheets in a workbook? Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 provides you with a wide variety of options for making significant changes like these to your worksheets. Understanding how this functionality works will help you keep your documents updated without throwing away all of the valuable work you've already done.

Large worksheets with thousands, or perhaps millions, of data entries can be difficult to read. This can be especially true if you're working with a variety of data types, such as text, dollar amounts, percentages, and more. You may need to organize your data according to department, region, job role, or other important distinctions. And some data is simply more important than other data, and should stand out even at first glance. Fortunately, Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 allows you to present data in a wide variety of formats that can suit your specific needs. Understanding how to use and, perhaps more importantly, when and why to use these formatting options, will help you make your worksheets easy to read, professional in their appearance, and more useful.

You put a lot of work into creating, populating, and formatting your workbook. Now you may need to print hard copies of your workbooks to share with your colleagues, supervisor, or organizational leaders. Your workbooks may contain multiple worksheets, each of which could contain thousands of data entries, formulas, and results. Instead of printing all of this indiscriminately, you will need to print only what is necessary to deliver critical information to your audience. Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 has a wide variety of printing options that can save your document recipients from having to sift through mounds of irrelevant data.

So far, you have largely worked within workbooks and worksheets to enter, view, analyze, format, and present your organizational data. But there's more to being proficient in Microsoft® Office Excel® 2021 than simply working within your workbooks. Managing the overall structure of your workbooks, manipulating how you view your workbooks, and knowing how to find the workbook you need, when you need it, are all critical tasks you'll need to perform from time to time. Understanding what functionality is available and knowing how to use it will ensure you're able to get the most out of the workbooks, worksheets, and data you've already worked so hard to create.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.