Creating and formatting tables

- If you asked me to teach you to do one single thing in Excel I would want to show you how to create and format tables. It's such an important skill. Once you're comfortable with inputting data into a table you'll be ready to start using all the powerful tools and functions in Excel. In this lesson, I'll show you how to get started with tables so that you can begin using Excel's excellent calculating capabilities. The first thing to do is open Excel from the app launcher on Office.com. Next I'll need to create a workbook. A workbook is a file that contains one or more worksheets to help organize data. Think of it as the digital version of a physical workbook, a single place to keep several related sheets together. In Excel, there are a few different ways to start a new workbook. I can choose from templates or create a blank workbook. In this lesson I'm going to create a new budget as an example. So I'll start from scratch and select new blank workbook. Once the workbook is created, I'm going to name and then save the new workbook right away, so I won't lose any of my work. Select the file name to open a window where you can change the name and the location of where it'll be saved. I'm going to name this My Budget. Now that I've named and saved my workbook I want to take a look at my worksheet. Creating a workbook automatically creates sheet one, a blank spreadsheet that's ready to go. You can create additional sheets by selecting the plus sign at the bottom, but for now I only need one sheet. To rename a sheet, hover over the tab at the bottom left of the screen and right click sheet one. A menu will open with a number of actions to choose from. Select rename, now a new window opens asking to rename the sheet. I'm going to rename the sheet Expenses. Then select Okay. Notice the tab that was labeled sheet one is now labeled Expenses. Now that I've renamed my sheet, I'm ready to create a table. First I'll label the column so that I know where to put each piece of information. In this sample, I want to track my monthly expenses. So I'll label two columns, one column for types of monthly expenses and another for their amounts. To label the first column, select the A1 cell and type monthly expenses. For the second column, select the B1 cell and name it amount. I want to be able to see the full title for my monthly expenses. So I'll just adjust the column width, to see all of my text. Now that I have headers for the information I'm going to put into my table, I can start adding data to my table. I have a number of expenses to categorize and keep track of. So I'll type these categories under monthly expenses. I'll start with housing. Next, I'll enter the amount I spend for housing each month in my second column. I select cell B2 and type in the amount. Now that I've added housing to my table, I'll do the same thing for the rest of my monthly expenses. Now that I've input my data I can make the table easier to read using format as table. I'll select all the cells of my table, including the titles. Then in the styles portion of the ribbon select format as table. This opens several formatting options for tables I could use. I'll choose the alternating colors format because it makes it easier for me to read each line. Since my table has titles, or headers, at the top I'm going to make sure to leave my table has headers selected. I now have a budget that is formatted the way that I want and is ready to use. Now that you know how to create and format a table you can give it a try with your own data.