Miscrosoft Excel

Plan and analyse

Excel is a spreadsheet app that enables you to analyse numeric data, forecast what may happen when it changes and so plan ahead. It is often used to analyse finances, but this is far from its only use.

Use a template

Spreadsheets are used by companies to analyse data relating to their business, but they are also useful for home users – for example, to monitor and analyse your monthly spending and create budgets. An Excel file is called a workbook and it contains one or more worksheets, so you could track your spending for each year in separate sheets and save them all in one workbook.

To start from scratch, click File>New>Blank workbook (Fig 1). It contains one spreadsheet and the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the window enables extra sheets to be added in tabs. There are hundreds of ready-made workbooks and you can save a lot of time and effort by