Lesson 1: Introduction

Hi and welcome to our Excel lessons. We’re going to walk you through a couple of Excel exercises that are perfect for beginners. We will slowly ramp up the difficulty from beginner to advanced.

Getting started with formulas

‘Formulas?!’ You may be thinking. ‘That’s way too advanced for a first Excel beginner exercise.’ It’s not really. Let me explain why: formulas and functions are the bread and butter of Excel. If you want to work with Excel, it is wise to at least know what a formula looks like and why a formula is handy. That’s why we’re starting with this. Don’t worry, they are really not as complicated as they sound.

So let’s jump into it. We will be calculating the result of 32+57. However, we won’t be doing that ourselves, we will be making Excel do the hard work for us.

To start with a formula in Excel, we have to fill in the equals sign = into a cell. After that, we add our formula, so 32+57 in this case. The resulting cell content becomes =32+57.

Move your mouse over to the spreadsheet editor on the right of this page. Double click on cell A1 (the top-left cell). You can now edit the contents. Replace the Edit this cell text with

=32+57

Then, press the Enter key on your keyboard.

Note: all of the exercises have a Show answer button in the top-right that you can click if you cannot figure out what the answer has to be. You can also reset the editor back to its default contents using the Reset button.