Introduction to Excel

This instruction booklet will give you a very basic overview of some features in Microsoft Excel 2007. It
will serve as a guideline for professors to manage the grades in their classes. In order to successfully
complete these instructions, you will need the following:

 Computer
 Microsoft Excel 2007

Note: These illustrations are extracted from Excel 2007 but will be the same in the 2010 edition.

Step 1: The first thing you will need to do is open Microsoft Excel 2007 on your computer. In order to do
this, you will first need to left-click the start button, move the cursor up to all programs, move the cursor
to Microsoft Office in the list that appears to the right, left-click on Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

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Step 2: Once Microsoft Excel 2007 opens, the next thing you will need to do is enter the data that you
would like to work with. For these instructions we will provide you with data to enter. By left-clicking on
a cell, you will be able to type in that cell. First, type on cell A2 and type “Student 1”.

Step 3: Now, we will create 9 more students for the class. Instead of typing “Student 2” in cell A3,
“Student 3” in cell A4, and so on; we will use a trick to do this much more quickly. In the lower right
hand corner of the selected cell, there will be a black square. Point your cursor at that and a black cross
will appear. Left-click and drag the box down to cell A11. You will see that Excel has completed the list,
rather than having to type each student in individually. You may create as many students needed using
this method

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Step 4: Next we will create 5 tests for the class. We will make a column for each test the class has taken.
Typing “Test 1” in cell B1 will give us a start. Now, use the same method that we used to complete the
list of students, but drag the black square to the right this time.

Step 5: Now that we have headings laid out for the data, we must enter the scores for each student on
each test. To do this, simply click on the cell you would like to enter data into, and type the score
associated with that cell.

Note: You may enter your own data and continue these steps if preferred

Step 6: When entering this data it will be easiest to start in cell B2 and enter all of the data for
Student 1. In order to do this, left-click on cell B2 and type “87”. After doing this hit the Tab button on
your keyboard and cell C2 will be selected. Enter the appropriate number for that data and repeat until
the data for test 5 has been entered. After you enter the data in cell F2, hit the Enter key on the
keyboard and cell B3 will be selected. Repeat these steps until you have entered all of the data for each
student. The scores needed to complete these instructions are shown below:

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Step 7: Now that all of the data for the class has been entered, we will first find the class average for
each test. We will start with Test 1. The first thing we will do is to highlight all of the scores on test one.
To do this left click in the middle of the cell with Student 1’s score and drag your cursor all the way down
to Student 10’s score.

Step 8: After highlighting all of the scores for Test 1, the next thing to do is find the average. To do this
we will use the AutoSum tool. This is located in the upper right-hand corner of the Excel program under
the home tab. Once you have located this, click on the downward pointing arrow and a list of functions
will appear. Left-click on the Average option and Excel will calculate the average for Test 1. (Should be
83.5 if you used our sample data)

Note: The AutoSum feature is only located in the Home tab. If you have any tab besides the Home tab
selected you will not see the AutoSum function.

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Step 9: The next thing we will want to do is find the average for the other tests. Instead of repeating the
process we used for Test 1 to find each score, we will use the same method we used to complete the
test list (Step 4). By simply selecting cell B12, and dragging the black square in the lower right hand
corner to cell F12, Excel will copy the average function from cell B12 to F12.

Step 10: Now that we have the average for each test, we will want to find each student’s final grade or
test average. We will follow the same procedure as Step 7 except instead of selecting all of the scores
for Test 1; we will select all of the scores for Student 1.

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Step 11: After selecting all of Student 1’s scores it is time to find the average. Much like Step 8, we will
use the average function.

Note: Again, make sure that you are in the Home tab.

Step 12: Once you have found the final grade for Student 1, we will find the final grade for the other
students. We will follow the same procedure as Step 9. Simply select cell G2, and drag the black square
in the lower right hand corner down to cell G11. The final grade for each student should appear as
follows:

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Step 13: A lot of the time students and teachers like to see a graph showing the distribution of each test.
This is another feature that Excel can produce. We will create a graph showing the distribution of Test 1.
First, we must select all of the grades in Test 1, not including the average we found earlier.

Step 14: Next, we will turn the selected data into a graph. To do this we will need to go to the Insert tab
(to the right of the Home tab). After left-clicking the Insert tab, a new group of icons will appear under it.
We need to left-click on the arrow below Column. A drop-down menu will appear with different graph
options. For this we will select the first option shown in 3-D Column.

Note: The graph options are only located in the Insert tab. If you are in any other tab besides the Insert
tab you will not see the graph options.

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Step 15: Once you have navigated to the 3-D Column, simply left-click on the first option and a graph of
our data will be created in the Excel document.

Note: There are many options to edit this graph to your individual needs. We will not address those
options in these instructions.

This concludes our Introduction tutorial to Excel. We have covered very basic but necessary functions in
Excel to get you started with the program. There are hundreds of different features in Excel that allow
you to manipulate data and create visually appearing graphs. We hope that the instructions provided
will give you a jumpstart on using Microsoft Excel. If you need any further assistance you may click on
the help bubble located in the top right corner of the program or contact us at ExcelHelp@Excel.org

Introduction to Excel

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