Technology for Merchandise Planning and Control Contents: Module Three: Formatting Worksheets Working with Charts UREFERENCE/PAGES Formatting Worksheets... Unit C Formatting Values... Excel 52 Excel 57 Working with Columns and Rows... Excel 58 Excel 61 Colors, Patterns and Borders... Excel 62 Excel 63 Conditional Formatting... Excel 64 Excel 65 Working with Sheets/Spell Checking... Excel 66 Excel 69 Working with Charts... Unit D Plan/Create/Move/Resize a Chart... Excel 80 Excel 85 Changing a Chart Design/Layout... Excel 86 Excel 89 Format/Annotate/Draw on a Chart... Excel 90 Excel 93 Create a Pie Chart... Excel 94 Excel 95 Assignments: UEXCEL SPREADSHEETS (1) QST Advertising Expenses See Step 1 Page Excel 52 (2) Quarterly Tour Revenue See Step 1 Page Excel 82 (3) Health Insurance Premiums Skills Review: Pages Excel 71 Excel 73 (4) Departmental Software Usage Skills Review: Pages Excel 97 Excel 98 Quiz Preparation UREVIEW FOR PRACTICE Unit C Concepts Review Pages Excel 70 Excel 71 Unit D Concepts Review Pages Excel 96 Excel 97 1 Note: P PXL2007 = Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Illustrated Complete, Elizabeth Eisner Reding/Lynn Wermers
Formatting Worksheets FORMATTING VALUES Using advanced formatting features will enable you to make a worksheet more attractive and easier to read. Different formatting features such as applying colors (foreground or background), changing font styles, font attributes and alignment and font sizes, or adjusting column widths and row heights allow fine-tuning the appearance of your spreadsheet to meet exacting standards. You can insert or delete columns and rows or apply conditional formatting to emphasize specific details in a report of analysis. The examples in Unit C address compiling information on advertising expenses for business locations during the past 4 quarters. This exercise expands on the ability to format a worksheet to make it easier to read and to emphasize important data. Follow steps 1 through 9 on page Excel 52 of your text to practice using the various tools for formatting values in spreadsheets. Review The illustrations on page Excel 53 to check your results. Also, complete steps 1 through 6 on page 54, checking the results against the illustrations on page Excel 55 and steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 56, validating against illustrations on page Excel 57 WORKING WITH COLUMNS AND ROWS Adjusting Column Widths and Row Heights: Mouse Pointer Shapes in Excel As with any activity, expert worksheet construction requires knowing and applying the fundamentals. A spreadsheet is planned from the overview perspective, but it is built at the cellular level, i.e., from the ground up. Here are some mouse pointer shapes to understand and master in making table construction quicker and more efficient: A. The hollow cross shape ( ). This is the base mouse pointer shape; it displays as you navigate a worksheet. Use it to select a cell or range of cells. B. The hollow arrow ( ). This pointer form appears after a cell or a range of cells is selected and the pointer is positioned over a border of the selected cell(s).with the hollow arrow, a selection can be dragged to a new location. This is a convenient alternative to cutting and pasting. If the control key(ctrl) is held down while dragging, the selection is copied instead of moved. Note: may also appear with a four-headed arrow and plus sign.
C. The plus sign ( ). The mouse pointer changes to the plus sign shape when positioned over the copy/fill handle of a selected cell or range of cells. With this pointer shape, a selection can be copied to an adjacent range by dragging. You can also create a series of sequential entries (1,2,3, Mon, Tue, Wed, Jan, Feb, Mar, etc.) D. The double arrow ( ). This pointer enables adjusting column width or row height by dragging the borders. Double clicking a column border with the double arrow shape will Autofit the column to its widest entry. Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 58 of your text to adjust column width in the spreadsheet. Refer to illustrations and information on page Excel 59 to confirm your results. Inserting and Deleting Rows and Columns Inserting or Deleting Rows and Columns: Using column and row headers, select the number of columns desired for insertion to the left of the selected columns or the number of rows desired to be inserted above the selected rows. Select Insert/Column, Insert/Row (or Edit/Delete) menu commands to complete the action. Follow steps 1 through 7 on page Excel 60 of your text to modify your worksheet as directed. Review the Quick Tips along the left hand column of the page. Also, note the information in the User Tips at the bottom of page Excel 60 regarding hiding and unhiding columns and rows. A special note is in order here, to mention the effect of inserting rows or columns in ranges that are referenced by formulas. Planning ahead in constructing formulas and inserting rows or columns will ensure that formulas automatically adjust to include the newly inserted addresses. If the column or row you are inserting is in a range referenced by a formula, don t forget to check the results of the formula after insertion to make sure they are still correct. COLORS, PATTERNS AND BORDERS Colors, patterns, and borders enhance the overall appearance of a worksheet and make it easier to read. You can add these enhancements by using the Border and Fill Color buttons in the Font Group on the Home tab of Ribbon, or by using the Fill tab and the Border tab in the Format Cells dialog box. You can apply a color to the background of a cell (or range of cells) or to the cell contents, and you can apply a pattern to a cell or range of cells. You can apply borders to all the cells in a worksheet or only to selected cells to call attention to selected information. In this exercise you add a pattern, a border, and color to the title of the worksheet to give it a more professional appearance.
Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 62 of your text to apply colors patterns and borders to select cells in the sample worksheet. Review the information, illustrations and instructions on page Excel 63 for assistance in understanding and applying these changes. CONDITIONAL FORMATTING Formatting can also be used to highlight important aspects of the data in your spreadsheet. For example you can apply formatting that automatically changes the font color to red for any cells where ad costs exceed $100.00 or to green for ad costs that are below $50.00. This is called conditional formatting. Conditional formatting is updated if you change the data in the worksheet. It is used here to highlight advertising costs that exceed the yearly budget. You will use conditional formatting to highlight certain trends and patterns in the data so it s easy to spot and helpful to the analysis. Follow steps 1 through 7 on page Excel 64 of your text to apply conditional formatting to the Advertising Expenses worksheet. Illustrations on the facing page (Excel 65) provide information on Data Bars, setting conditions using the dialog box, and validating the results of conditional formatting. WORKING WITH SHEETS An excel workbook initially contains three worksheets, named Sheet1, Sheet2, and Sheet3. The sheetname appears on the sheet tab at the bottom of the worksheet. When you open a workbook the first worksheet is the active sheet. To move from sheet to sheet, you can click on the sheet tab at the bottom of the worksheet window. You can also rename each sheet and add color to the tabs. You can organize them by moving the sheets so they appear in alphabetical order, for example. In the Advertising Expenses worksheet, Sheet1 contains information on advertising expenses. Sheet2 contains an advertising budget, and Sheet3 contains no data. In this section you will name the two sheets in the workbook to reflect their contents, add color to the sheet tabs, and change their order. You can optionally delete the unused sheet.
Follow steps 1 through 9 on page Excel 66 of your text to explore moving from sheet to sheet using the sheet tabs, to rename the sheets, apply colors to the sheet tabs and to rearrange them in the specified order. A right click on Sheet3 tab will pop up a shortcut menu allowing you to delete the empty sheet. Refer to the information and illustrations on page Excel 67 for guidance and confirmation of your results SPELL CHECKING Spell checking in the Excel application works exactly the same as in Word and other Microsoft applications. Two precautions are in order: first, remember that the Excel dictionary is limited in its contents and analytic capability for checking the correct spelling on many similar words. The final check for accuracy must be your own (or a friends) thorough and careful review. Secondly, the spell checker in Excel reviews only the active worksheet not the entire workbook. You must run spell checker on each worksheet individually. Follow steps 1 through 9 on page Excel 68 of your text to practice using spell checker. Make the corrections to the practice worksheet and note the operational requirements for future use. Also, review the use of the Find/Replace functions in steps 5, 6, and 7. Be sure to review the Quick Tip entries on the page, as well as the User tips in the gold area at the bottom of the page. Note the use of Print Preview to examine the results of your effort before printing the completed worksheet. Working with Charts PLANNING, CREATING, MOVING AND RESIZING A CHART Charts present information in a graphical format, making it easier to see patterns, trends, and relationships. In this unit, you will learn how to create a chart, how to edit the chart and change the chart type, how to add text annotations and arrows, and how to preview and print the chart. In the example worksheet (Quarterly Tour Revenues), you will create and enhance a chart showing the increase in company revenues over the past 4 quarters.
Review the details and guidelines for planning a chart on pages Excel-80 and Excel-81. Before creating a chart you need to plan the information you want the chart to show and how you want it to look. Planning ahead helps you to decide on what type of chart to create and how to organize the data. Understanding the parts of the chart makes it easier to format and change specific elements so the chart best serves your purpose. Review the illustrations and tabular data on page Excel-81 to note the specialized terminology and to identify chart elements. Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 82 of your text to open the student file EX D 1 and create a basic column chart. You should have the downloaded Student Files in a location in your computer storage from earlier activities. You will need them repeatedly throughout the course. In completing this exercise (as in creating any chart), it is important to carefully select the initial range of data that you will be charting. Note that the instructions direct you to select any row and column headings (labels) that are to be included in the chart, but not to select totals from your data (neither row totals nor column totals) as these relatively large numbers will distort the presentation of data in the finished chart. The illustrations on page Excel 83 will assist you in understanding the Excel Charting Wizard and the detailed terminology of charting. Charts are objects that are not located in any specific cell or any specific range address in your worksheet. You can select the chart or its parts by clicking within its borders or clicking on the object you wish to select. You can move a selected chart anywhere within the worksheet without affecting the related data in the worksheet. Any data change in the worksheet is automatically updated in the related chart. Also, any object changed in the chart will affect the underlying, related worksheet data (data selected in the first step of creating the chart). You can resize a chart by dragging the sizing handles, and you can move the chart to a different location even to a different worksheet and it will still reflect the original data that was selected in creating the chart. Chart objects contained other objects such as titles and the legend, which you can also move, resize and modify. You can select and drag, or cut and paste any chart object to a new location. In this exercise you will resize the chart, position it below the worksheet data, and move the legend. Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 84 of your text to move the chart to a new location, resize it, and change the location of the legend. (The legend is the text box at the right hand side of the chart identifying the color coding of the charted elements.) Additionally, step 7 illustrates that changing data will be reflected automatically in the related chart. CHANGING THE DESIGN AND LAYOUT OF A CHART Once you have created a chart, it is relatively easy to modify the design. However, a chart may include a complex number of elements that you may wish to modify. Each of the chart tools appearing on the control ribbon at the top of the Excel Window, can be used to make specific changes in a chart. You can change the chart type in the Type Group, modify the data range and configuration in the Data Group, change the layout of objects in the Chart Layout Group, choose coordinating color schemes in the Chart Styles Group, and move the location of the chart in the Location Group. The layouts in the Chart Styles Group offer preconfigured arrangements of objects in your chart, such as the legend, title, or grid lines. These preconfigured layouts offer an alternative to manually formatting and changing the design of your chart. In this example you will make corrections to the data for the United States in the second and fourth quarters. After you correct this data, you will explore how the same data looks using different chart layouts and types.
Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 86 to change the chart data and to modify the chart layout. Refer to information on the facing page (Excel 87) to verify the correct application of the operations and concepts. Don t forget to review the User Tips in the gold highlighted areas for additional insights and information. Complete steps 1 through 9 on page Excel 88, referring to explanatory illustrations on page Excel 89, to modify the chart layout. FORMATTING, ANNOTATING AND DRAWING ON A CHART Formatting a chart can make it easier to read and understand, while annotating and drawing on a chart can add text and graphics to point out critical information. Formatting enhancements can be made using that Chart Tools Format tab. You can change colors or apply a style to a data series using the Shape Styles Group. Styles make it easier to apply multiple formats such as an outline, fill color, and text color. In this exercise you will improve the appearance of the chart by creating titles for the horizontal and vertical axes and by adding a drop shadow to the chart title. You will add a text annotation and an arrow to point out information within the chart. Follow steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 90 to format the chart using colors applied to elements of the chart. Steps 1 through 8 on page Excel 92 walk you through the activities for adding annotation and for drawing an arrow in your chart. CREATING A PIE CHART You can create multiple charts based on the same worksheet data. While a column chart may illustrate certain important aspects of your worksheet data, you may find you want to create an additional chart to emphasize a different point. Depending on the type of chart you create, you have additional options for calling attention to trends and patterns. For example, if you create a pie chart, you can emphasize one data point by exploding, or pulling that slice away from the pie chart. This exercise directs you to create a pie chart that can be used to illustrate total revenue. Follow steps 1 through 9 on page Excel 94 to create and enhance a pie chart based on the same data used in creating the earlier column chart. Note that steps 8 and 9 provide directions for configuring the final output and printing your chart. Although there is no need to print out the chart, the file you submit for this exercise must reflect these changes as your work should be completely ready to print and publish.