Menu/Ribbon

From my experience, one of the first things to conquer when learning Excel is the Menu or as they call it now "the Ribbon".  In this post, I'm going to just give a high level quick overview of each tab on the Ribbon.  In future posts I will go into more detail on the specific tabs and functions.

File
This tab is what I like to call the "command center".  This is where you can create a new workbook, or open an existing workbook.  It also has the save and print functions.  One thing that I use quite often on this tab is the "Recent Workbooks" function.  It's a great way to pull up workbooks you have recently been in.

Home
This tab contains your basic formatting functions, along with a few "quick functions" in the Editing box on the far right.  If you are looking to copy/paste or change your font, color, alignment, etc., this is the tab to be on.  As far as the "quick functions", Excel took some of commonly used functions from other tabs, such as sort, filter, and some common formulas and added them to this main tab.

Insert
This tab is great for bringing in information from external places, such as pictures or links.  This tab also has great tools to help summarize your data, such as pivot tables and charts.

Page Layout
This tab is all about how you want you spreadsheet to be printed.  You can select the page orientation, the margins and specify only a set portion of the spreadsheet to be printed.

Formulas
This is tab is one of my favorite tabs and as it reads, it is all about the formulas.  It provides you with formula groupings as well as some auditing tools for your formulas.  If you are using formulas in your spreadsheet and it appears that they are not calculating (or if you don't want them to calculate automatically), this is the tab you want to go to.

Data
My other favorite tab!  This tab has great tools to pull in data from external sources as well as functions to be able to refresh that data.  There are also some great Data Tools on this tab that can be quite fun to use once you get the hang of them.  One of my favorites is the "What-if Analysis" tool, which I will write a more detailed post about later.

Review
This tab contains what I like to call the "Word" functions.  It contains tools to check spelling, insert comments and track changes.

View
This tab provides useful functions for how you want to view your spreadsheet as you are working in it.  One of the functions I use most on this tab is the "Freeze Panes" function, especially when working with large data sets.

Excel ya later!