What is Excel?
Excel is a giant grid of boxes for holding and analysing data — the everyday tool of analysts everywhere.
What you will learn
- Name the parts of a spreadsheet (rows, columns, cells)
- Explain why analysts love Excel
- Find your way around the grid
A spreadsheet is just a grid
Excel is a program made of one huge grid of little boxes. Each box is called a cell, and you can type numbers, words or dates into it. That is really all a spreadsheet is — a tidy grid you fill with data.
The grid is organised two ways at once:
- Columns run up and down. They are labelled with letters: A, B, C, and so on.
- Rows run left to right. They are labelled with numbers: 1, 2, 3, and so on.
- A cell sits where a column and a row meet, so it gets a name from both — like A1 or C5.
A tiny example
Imagine a sales sheet. The headings sit in row 1, and the data fills the rows below:
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product | Sales |
| 2 | Apples | 120 |
| 3 | Bananas | 90 |
| 4 | Cherries | 60 |
Here the word Apples is in cell A2, and its sales number 120 is in cell B2. The very first cell, A1, holds the heading Product.
Reading an address is always the same: take the column letter first, then the row number. So the sales for Bananas (the number 90) sit in B3 — column B, row 3. Try it: where does the number 60 live? Column B, row 4, so it is in B4.
Tip: Think of the grid like the board game Battleship or seats in a cinema: every box has a unique address from its column and row, so you can point to exactly one spot — “column B, row 3” — with no confusion. That simple addressing is what lets formulas refer to your data.
Why analysts love it
- It can add up, average and count thousands of numbers in a blink.
- Change one number and everything updates automatically.
- It turns raw data into charts and reports people can actually read.
- You need no coding — you just type into boxes.
Tip: A workbook can hold many sheets (see the little tabs at the bottom, like Sheet1). Think of a workbook as a folder and each sheet as one page of data inside it.
Watch out: Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc all work almost the same way. The formulas you learn here work in all of them, so do not worry about which one you have.
Q. In a spreadsheet, what is a “cell”?
✍️ Practice
- Open a blank sheet and type your name in A1, your city in A2 and your age in A3.
- Write down the cell name for: the third row of column C, and the heading at the top of column B.
🏠 Homework
- Make a small table of five of your favourite foods with a price for each. Note which cell holds the first price.