Entering Data

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Let’s continue on with our tutorials. Click the next button to begin entering data in your Excel worksheet.

Column & Row Titles

It is helpful to organize your worksheet by entering titles at the top of each column.

In the example, the column titles are the Tests across the top of the worksheet.

You'll often want to enter row titles too. In our example, the row titles down the left side are the names of the students.

This worksheet can be used as an electronic grade book. This topic will be addressed in a later tutorial.

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Tab and Enter

In this example we are creating a list of salespeople names., the date and the amount of purchase. As you can see we have column titles: Name, Date, and Amount.

We don't need row titles down the left side of the worksheet in this case; the salespeople names are in the leftmost column.

To create this you would type “NAME” in cell A1 and press TAB. Then you’d type “DATE" in cell B1. Pressing TAB will take you to cell C1 for “AMOUNT”

After typing the column titles, you'd click in cell A2 to begin typing the names of the salespeople.

You would type the name, and then press ENTER to move the selection down one cell to cell A3 (down the column), and then type the next name, and so on.

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ENTER

T A B

Date and Time

To enter a date in column B, the Date column, you should use a slash or a hyphen to separate the parts: Excel recognizes both as a date.

If you need to enter a time, type the numbers, a space, and then "a" or "p“. If you put in just the number, Excel defaults and enters it as AM. Military time is also recognized and accepted.

Tip    To enter today's date, press CTRL and the semicolon (;) together. To enter the current time, press CTRL and SHIFT and the semicolon all at once

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Enter 4/12/2009 or 12-April-2009

Enter 9:00 a or 9:00 p

Entering Numbers

To enter the sales amounts in column C, the Amount column, you would type the dollar sign ($), followed by the amount.

Other numbers and how to enter them

To enter fractions, leave a space between the whole number and the fraction. (For example, 1 1/8)

To enter a fraction only, enter a zero first. (For example, 0 1/4) If you enter 1/4 without the zero, Excel will interpret the number as a date, January 4.

If you type (100) to indicate a negative number by parentheses, Excel will display the number as -100.

Calculations like add, divide, multiply, and subtract numbers in Excel will be taught in the formulas tutorial.

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