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Welcome to the first video in a series of videos showing how to use Excel with engineering economy topics. This first video is just Excel basics. Notice that Excel is two dimensional; you have columns and you have rows. The columns are given letters of the alphabet, if you run out, it'll go over to AA and then the rows are given numbers. The proper terminology for this cell would be A1, while this cell would be K3. It's always the column followed by the row number. In Excel there are three different types of data that you can put in. If you're simply typing some text, it's called the label. So for instance we could type, Given information, that is a label. You can also put a number in, which is called a numerical value.
Say I had gone to the gas station and I had put in 18 gallons of gas. I could simply put 18 and out to the right I could put, Gallons of gas, to describe it. Notice I didn't put $18 worth of gas in, I only put 18 gallons. If you right click on the cell, you can go to format cells and I can change that simply to a number and I don't need any decimal places on this particular one. Then, I could type, Miles driven.
Say I drove 452 miles on those 18 gallons of gas. If your label goes wider than your column, you can simply get the cursor with the…or get the arrows on your cursor and double click and the column will go to the width of your text. Now, maybe I want to solve and I want to know miles per gallon. This is where formula comes in. I could simply type, equals 452 divided by 18 and I would know that I got 25.11. Now, it says 25.11 but to know what's behind this, simply click on the cell and you can see the background calculation. I can also format the cell and I only want two decimal places. The other thing that you could do on this particular one is, you don't have to actually type the numbers in.
I'm going to delete this. I could simply put equals and I could point to 452 put the slash for divided and then click the cell that has the 18 which was A2 and I would get 25.11 gallons. This is a good habit to get into because, say I went back and I keep in the spreadsheet and turns out this time for some reason I got 485 miles. Notice when I changed 485 it automatically updated my calculation below, that's because I pointed to the cell rather than using the physical number. Get into this habit. So, what I've shown here today is just some Excel basics to get started with.
Remember you can put text, numbers, or formulas. A big thing you should get in the habit of doing is making sure your data is organized. Give your data headers, give your datas descriptors and remember if you need to see what's behind a cell, simply click on it and it will show in the formula bar. By getting into these good habits, if you need to come back to the project, you can see what went on or if you need to copy it somewhere else, you can do that