Microsoft Office is a very powerful suite of tools that businesses use everyday, but unless you are familiar with all the special features of a program like excel you can’t use it to it’s full ability. In this article we will just touch on some of the features of Microsoft Excel and what you can acutally accomplish with this powerful program.

Looking at excel you can first see that it is setup in a grid evironment and if you click on either side of the grid you can easily resize it to what you want. You can type anything you want in these fields just like any word processor you have every used. If you right click on a particular cell and choose “format cell” you can change to type of content excel thinks is in that cell. We can choose to set the cell as a currency so that we have a $ attached to all numbers. You can also set colors, fonts, and orientation of the text in this field.

The most helpful feature of excel is the ability to do formulas and be able to automatically  add mutiple cells together. If you put = in the field as the first character excel knows that everything after the = is going to be a formula. From here you can click on individual cells to add them to the formula with your normal mathatical operations.

ex: =A3+B3

The above formula would add the contents of cell A3 and cell B3 together. Formulas can become very complex and can even do logical operators to help make decisions.