The most widely used spreadsheet application in the world, Excel is a key part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. You can use Excel for anything from a small spreadsheet of household finances to monster databases of all your company’s products, customers, and sales. You can use Excel either on its own or together with the other Office applications. Excel 2003 builds on the many previous versions of Excel to deliver powerful functionality and many new features along with a slick and easy-to-use interface. If you’re new to Excel, you’ve got a large amount to learn. If you’re coming to Excel 2003 as an experienced user of earlier versions, you’ve still got plenty to learn. But either way, this book will get you up to speed quickly.

This book is designed to help beginning and intermediate users get the most out of Excel 2003 in the shortest possible time. If you fall into either of those categories, you’ll benefit from this book’s comprehensive coverage, focused approach, and helpful advice. If you’re an Excel expert seeking super-advanced coverage, look elsewhere.

■ Chapter 1, “Get Started with Excel,” shows you how to launch Excel in the many ways that Windows provides and how to navigate the main components of the Excel screen. You’ll also learn what workbooks and worksheets are, how to select objects, and how to get help on using Excel.

■ Chapter 2, “Configure Excel to Suit Your Working Needs,” discusses how to improve your view of worksheets by splitting the view, displaying extra windows, hiding and redisplaying windows, zooming the view, and freezing particular rows and columns so they never move while everything else scrolls. You’ll learn how to set the most important of Excel’s many options to customize its behavior, how to load add-ins when you need the extra functionality they provide, and how to configure AutoCorrect to save you time and effort.

■ Chapter 3, “Create Spreadsheets and Enter Data,” starts by explaining how to create a new workbook in any of several convenient ways and how to save it, and then shows you how to create your own templates to use as the basis for future worksheets. You’ll also find out how to enter data in your worksheets manually and by using Excel’s AutoFill feature, how to use Excel’s Find and Replace features, and how to recover your work if Excel crashes.

■ Chapter 4, “FormatWorksheets for Best Effect,” discusses how to manipulate the worksheets in a workbook, and then moves on to cover formatting cells and ranges using the many types of formatting that Excel supports.

■ Chapter 5, “Add Graphics and Drawings to Worksheets,” shows you how to add visual impact to your worksheets by including pictures, shapes, diagrams, and other graphical objects. This chapter also explains how Excel’s drawing layer handles graphical objects and how you can position, resize, and format objects.

■ Chapter 6, “Check, Lay Out, and PrintWorksheets,” explains how to get your worksheets into shape for printing and how to print them. Topics covered include checking spelling, setting the print area, specifying the paper size and orientation, creating headers and footers, and using Print Preview to avoid wasting paper. You’ll also learn to set and adjust page breaks and specify which extra items to include in the printout.

■ Chapter 7, “Perform Calculations with Functions,” covers what functions are and how you enter them in your worksheets. You’ll also learn about the nine categories of functions that Excel provides, with examples of some of the most useful functions in each category.

■ Chapter 8, “Create Formulas to Perform Custom Calculations,” starts by teaching you the basics of formulas in Excel and the components from which formulas are constructed. After that, you’ll learn how Excel handles numbers, and how to create both regular formulas and array formulas. The end of the chapter shows you how to troubleshoot formulas when they don’t work correctly.

■ Chapter 9, “Organize Data with Excel Databases,” shows you how to create Excel databases, enter data, and sort and filter the data to find the information you need. This chapter also covers how to link an Excel worksheet to an external database (for example, an Access database) so that you can extract data to an Excel worksheet and manipulate it there, and how to perform web queries to bring web data into worksheets.

■ Chapter 10, “Outline and Consolidate Worksheets,” discusses how to outline a worksheet so that you can collapse it to show only the parts you need and how to consolidate multiple worksheets into a single worksheet. Both outlining and consolidation can save you welcome amounts of time.