Computer Awareness Quiz: MS Excel

Pressing Shift together with the spacebar selects the whole row that holds the active cell, from column A right across to the last column of the grid.

The title bar is the strip along the very top of the Excel window, and it carries the name of the open workbook followed by the name of the program, for example Book1 - Excel.

LEN returns the number of characters in an entry, counting letters, digits, punctuation and spaces alike, so =LEN("Excel") gives 5.

An electronic spreadsheet stores data in a grid of rows and columns and recalculates its formulas whenever a value changes, and Excel is the spreadsheet program of the Microsoft Office suite.

Ctrl together with F2 opens the print area of the Backstage view in Excel, Word and PowerPoint, where the page is shown exactly as it will be printed and the printer, copies, orientation and margins can be set.

From Excel 2007 onwards the suite moved to the Office Open XML formats, and a plain workbook saves with the.xlsx extension.

From Excel 2007 the grid of one worksheet was enlarged to 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, so the very last cell of the sheet is XFD1048576.

Excel treats whatever follows an equals sign as something to be calculated, so =A1+B1 adds the two cells and =SUM(A1:A10) totals a range.

A dollar sign locks the part of the address that follows it, so $A$1 has both the column and the row locked and keeps pointing at cell A1 however far the formula is copied.

Division by zero has no answer in arithmetic, so Excel refuses to invent one and writes #DIV/0! instead.

COUNT walks through the range and counts only the cells that hold a numeric value, which includes dates and times because Excel stores them as serial numbers.

Columns are lettered A to Z, then AA to AZ, BA to BZ and so on, and the 16,384th column of the enlarged grid falls at XFD.