From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

Using the Formula bar - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

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Using the Formula bar

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Even if you have not yet used formulas in Excel, you need to know about an important aspect of the Excel screen called the Formula Bar. It's located below the Ribbon and above the column letters in a worksheet. It's right here-- it's called the Formula Bar. Now, in this worksheet, which is already started and perhaps finished, we don't know necessarily. If we use our arrow keys and position the active cell for example, over one of the entries in row 6, we'll see that it's a formula. If I press the Up Arrow and go to cell G5, we see that that's simply a value. Many times when you're working with Excel, either when you're typing data or simply looking at a cell, you develop the habit of looking in the Formula Bar. It's almost an instinct, like the way you look out of the rearview mirror in your car when you're driving-- we do it frequently and often. The key idea here is that when you're looking at data that maybe you're not too familiar with, you want to know often, is it simply raw data or is it a formula? As I press the arrow key to the right here, now that may or may not be something I'm familiar with, but it's certainly is not 1600, really, that's actually a formula. The cell to the right of that, that's some kind of formula as well. Maybe we haven't seen that just yet, but it too is not 266.7, really. The numbers off to the left, the sales numbers are just pure numbers. Text entries are usually exactly what you see. As you type data, as you enter it, you'll be keeping an eye on the Formula Bar. As you are exploring worksheets that you're unfamiliar with, you'll learn to look at that Formula Bar frequently. It's always at the top of the screen and it's a good visual check as to what your worksheets really contain.

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