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.
Who Is This Book For?
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.
What Does This Book Cover?
Here’s what this book covers:
■ 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.
