Tutorial 00
INTRODUCTION TO EXCEL 11
Now that you know Excel 08 its time to move on

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The biology Departmentg is now using Office 11.  For our purposes Excel 11 has the same basic functionality as the Excel 08 that you are familiar with. It does have dozens of new bells and whistles, but, using any of them will likely result in noncompliance with the style manual. The one change in functionality that will impact you is the loss of text boxes from graphs. Workarounds for this will be discussed later.

What has changed is the GUI (graphical user interface). It has been modified to more closely resemble Excel running on a PC. The result is that all of the controls are in a different place and require a slightly different approach to using them. Virtually all of the operations that you need are now accessed through the “ribbon” , a strip of icons running across the top of the excel window.

This has one substantial advantage; icons represent all of the operations and they are right in front of you.

It also has on substantial disadvantage; icons represent all of the operations and they are right in front of you, so the ribbon is crowded with about 400 icons that you have likly never seen before.  This can be confusing to the beginner. The good news: most of these new features were designed for corporate users and are inappropriate for use in biology. The purpose of this tutorial is to highlight the specfic tools you need for data processing and presentation in Biology labs.

Let us begin our Excel tutorial with a discussion of the terminology that we will use throughout the tutorial. It will be helpful if you have your copy of Excel open while reviewing these pages. 

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Please send comments, problems or request for topics to

Walter I. Hatch
wihatch@smcm.edu
January 12, 2012