Working with spreadsheets is a critical skill in many workplace environments. Spreadsheets help organize complicated and dense data into easily readable forms, and are very useful for tracking productivity, schedules, and other important business tasks. Mastering the spreadsheet can take years of practice, but you should be able to grasp the basic principles with relative ease.
Instructions
1. Learn some of the basic vocabulary that surrounds spreadsheet use. For example, "rows" are horizontal sections and "columns" are vertical. Data is entered into areas called "cells," which are formed at the intersection of every row and column.
2. Open your spreadsheet software and create a new spreadsheet document.
3. Write the categories you would like to track across the top row of the spreadsheet with one entry per column. Skip the very first column so you can use it for numbering. For example, if you were tracking monthly sales at your store, you could enter "January" in the second column, "February" in the third, "March" in the fourth, and so on.
4. Enter the specific item names down the first column, placing one item on each row. Once again, skip the first entry. If you wanted to track shirt sales, for example, you would write "Red Shirts," on the second row, "White Shirts" on the third, and "Blue Shirts" on the fourth.
5. Look at the cell at the intersection of an item name and a month to enter the figure that corresponds to the two. Continuing with the monthly shirt sales example, if you sold 20 red shirts in March, you would look for the cell on the "Red Shirts" row, under the "March" column. You can then type "20" in that cell.
6. Navigate through cells using the arrow key. If you highlight a cell you can simply begin typing to update its information, then hit "Enter" to move on to the next cell.
7. Save your document periodically to ensure it is protected in the event of a power failure or system crash.
Tags: first column, sales example, shirt sales, shirt sales example
