Excel Intro:
Toolbars

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You need to inspect all the toolbars in Excel and learn where there are differences from what you might expect. These differences can create very unhappy surprises if you are not aware that they are there.

The Standard Toolbar

Most of the buttons on Excel's Standard toolbar are indeed standard. You will see the same buttons in other Microsoft programs, such as Word. However there are some differences in the way the buttons work that might cause problems. Your own version of Excel may have more or fewer buttons, but all of the most important ones remain the same between the versions.

Click on a button in the image of the Standard Bar above. A short explanation about what the button does will appear in a separate window. You can switch back and forth between the windows or you can use the Next button in the new window to go through all the buttons in order.

OR

You can view all the descriptions  or all the descriptions  on one page in a new window.

The Formatting Bar

With the Formatting Bar you can change the look of your spreadsheet text and numbers. Because numbers make up so much of what is in a spreadsheet, Excel has several buttons for formatting numbers. The other formatting buttons work as expected.

Formatting commands generally apply to the whole cell.  You can format just a part of the text inside a cell (font, font size, styles, color), but number formats, alignment, and indents apply to the whole cell. Alignments and indents apply within a cell only, not across a whole page or sheet. 

Click on a button in the image of the Formatting Bar above. A short explanation about what the button does will appear in a separate window. You can switch back and forth between the windows or you can use the Next button in the new window to go through all the buttons in order.

OR

You can view all the descriptions on one page in a new window.

The Formula Bar

To help keep life confusing, the term Formula Bar is used both for the whole bar you see below the Formatting toolbar, and also for the text box on the right which displays what is in the selected cell.

Buttons in Excel 97/2000 are somewhat different:

Click on each part of the Formula Bar in the image above. A short explanation about what the part does will appear in a separate window. You can switch back and forth between the windows or you can use the Next button in the new window to go through all the buttons in order.

OR

You can view all the descriptions on one page in a new window.

The Status Bar

The Status Bar hides down at the bottom of the window. It looks quite bare a lot of the time. Its job is to let you know what is going on - what the status is. 

The left side is for messages about what is going on. Mode indicators show what special features are turned on.

Click on each part of the Status Bar in the image above. A short explanation about what the part does will appear in a separate window. You can switch back and forth between the windows or you can use the Next button in the new window to go through all the buttons in order.

OR

You can view all the descriptions on one page in a new window.

~~  1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. ~~

Last updated: 02 May 2012