Chapter at a Glance

You might hear it said that Microsoft Excel is the most popular database program in the world, because people tend to store a lot of data in Excel workbooks. However, that’s not actually its intended purpose. In fact, Excel is a powerful tool for tracking, charting, analyzing, and sharing information so that you can make informed business decisions.

The basic Excel file is a workbook. The structure of an Excel workbook is more complex than that of a Microsoft Word document, because a workbook can contain more than one sheet of independent or linked information. Thankfully, in the 2008 version of Excel, Microsoft saw fit to include only one sheet in a standard blank workbook. One sheet is usually all you need. Older versions of Excel created three sheets in each workbook, so you had to delete the two you didn’t use. But of course, most people didn’t bother to delete them, so there are probably billions of unused sheets now taking up hard disk space.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about workbooks, sheets, and data. You’ll create workbooks and worksheets to store information, and you’ll practice various methods of entering information into worksheets.

Practice Makes Perfect!

You won’t need any practice files to complete the exercises in this chapter, but you’ll save the files you create in the CreateWorkbooks practice file folder. See "Using the Companion Content" at the beginning of this book for information about practice files.