SWK 3401.3-1.1 Getting Started: Understanding an Excel Data File

Introduction

The purpose of this activity is to learn the different parts of an Excel data file—called a “Worksheet” or “Workbook” in the Excel program, and called a datasheet or spreadsheet in general lingo.

Instructions

1. 1. Open this file in your Excel program:  student absenteeism example student version
      • Tip: any file with the ending .xls or .xlsx is an Excel file
   2. Let’s explore what you see.
      • At the very bottom left corner of the screen you should see “Sheet1.” That refers to this being the first worksheet (or page) of the data file. In this case, there is only one sheet.
      • Across the top of the file you should see column headings A, B, C, D, and so on through the whole alphabet. If you scroll way over to the right, you will see that when Excel ran out of 26 letters it started over again with an A in front of each letter (AA, AB, AC, AD, and so on).
      • Down the left side of the file you should see row numbers, starting with 1 and increasing as you scroll down.
      • Every “cell” in an Excel data spreadsheet has an address made up of these row and column headings. A useful tip: if you click on a cell (like B6) your location shows up in the small white box in the upper far left, making it easy to navigate the sheet.
      • In our example, the A column designates an ID number for each student in a classroom, B designates the number of days absent for each student, and C is the student’s gender.
   3. See if you get the same answers below as to what data (number) appears in each of the following cells. Another useful tip: if you click on a cell (like A4) the information contained in that cell shows up in the large white box above the column headings.
      

      Cell Address	Data
      A4	3
      B6	26
      C11	2

   4. See if you agree with the following two statements (each should be “True”):
      • The student with the ID number 10 (row 11) missed 12 days of school and is gender type 2. [Just for your information, 2 means girl but you needed more information about the study to know that.]
      • The student with the ID number 26 (row 27) missed 0 days of school and is gender type 1. [Which, just for your information, means boy.]
   5. That successfully concludes this activity!