Excel 2007 Training Video: Edit data

Learn how to enter, move and fill data in an Excel spreadsheet. A transcript is available for this video.

Managing data in Excel 2007

You can enter text and numerical data into Excel cells.

You can also move and fill data using various techniques.

In this demo we will look at adding text and data to your spreadsheet, using the zoom function, moving content and using the Fill handle.

Firstly to enter content into the screen, select the cell and type the information. I'm going to create a worksheet with some information on week 1 sales for a company.

Once of the best ways to save time in excel is to move information from one place to another.

For example, if I type in Monday into B3. If I wanted to move Monday from B3 to D3, I might firstly delete it, go to D3 and type in Monday. That's not a very quick way to do it. Another way is to use the cut option. Select B3, clicking paste. That's a quicker way.

The quickest way in which to move information in excel is to use the move feature.

If you look at the cursor, at the moment it looks like a big first aid cross. This is the cell selector cursor.

Now if I select the cell B3 and move the cursor over the border of B3, you will notice that the cursor changes in appearance to a 4-pointed arrow. When it's a 4-pointed arrow, If I use the left-hand mouse button, hold it down, and drag to the right, I can actually drag and drop content from one cell to another.

If I move the cursor over the border, I get a 4-pointed cursor, I left click and hold down the left mouse button, drag it to a new cell, release the button, it moves the content there very quickly.

If I was to enter the rest of the week days, the old way would be to type in the next day and press enter, then enter the next day etc. and maybe for 5 days it's not too bad, but if you're doing a whole month, or a long series of data it would be quite time consuming. So select those and press the delete key.

Now we have looked at the cursor as a large cross, which is the cell selector, we looked at the cursor when you move it over the border of a cell

in the bottom right-hand corner of the cell border, you will see a small square. This is called a fill handle. When you move the cursor over the fill handle, it will change into something different. Move the cursor over and you will see a small cross hair. That means you have a fill handle, and if you left click and drag down, it will fill the remaining cells with the series that is currently selected.

SO excel knows we have a day of the week selected. Move the cursor over the bottom right-hand corner, left-click and hold down the mouse button, and as I drag down, you can see a tool tip telling you what it's going to fill each cell with, now when I let go of the left mouse button, all those dates are put in there for me.

In Column b I have the days of the week. IN column c I can actually put in the sales figures. I'll just put in some dummy sales figures.

When I'm entering figures, they are automatically aligned to the right. While text entries are automatically aligned to the left. Excel has formatted these as column B as text and column C as numerical data.

The reason for that is that later we can produce formulas to calculate the sales figures.

If you wish to have a closer view at the details that have been entered, in the bottom right-hand corner of the excel interface, is the zoom slider. You can use the zoom slider in or out or you can just click on the plus icon to zoom in and see the screen a bit clearer.

In this demo we looked at entering text and numerical values. We also looked at using the Move feature, where you get a 4-point cursor.

Also the fill handle which is the small black square in the bottom right hand corner of the cell where you can left click and fill and drag the remaining cells with the series you have currently selected.