How to Open a Workbook in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, we will show you how to open a saved workbook, as well as using Autosum, Series Fill, Undo and Redo, and Zooming in and out.
Video Transcript
In this section I’m going starting off exactly from where I left off in the previous section. I closed the workbook that I just created but left Excel running. If I now wanted to reopen that same workbook, if I go into Backstage View and click on the Open option you’ll see that this particular page in Backstage View, the Open page, features on the right a list of recently opened workbooks. And of course my list of recently opened workbooks now has one workbook in it. So in order to open Demo 1 again I just select it and the workbook is opened and the cursor is exactly where I left it when I closed this workbook earlier on.
What I’m going to do now is to select a number of cells and I’m actually going to select from the cell G7, the one with 23 in it, across to J7 which is where the cursor currently is. Now there are a number of ways of doing this and one of the ways is to click in G7 and then just move the cursor across with the mouse held down and then let go when the cursor is over J7. And I now have multiple selection. I have selected four cells. And one of the options on the Ribbon in the Editing Group, now the Ribbon is this big rectangle of commands here, and there’s a group on the right, Editing, and one of the options in there is AutoSum. And if I click on the right hand arrow to the right of AutoSum and select Sum watch what happens. What happens that is in that fourth cell, J7, I see the sum of the contents of the other three cells. So you can now see Excel doing something useful for me. It is now storing the total of the contents of the other three cells.
Now one very important aspect of what’s just happened is that if I change the number in any one of the first three cells it will automatically update the total. So let’s click into that 19 cell again, H7 that contains 19, and I’m going to change the value from 19 to 79. Now in many ways the simplest way to change 19 to 79 is to select the cell and just type 79. Having entered that if I now click elsewhere, anywhere else within the sheet, my 79 value is accepted and note that the total, the sum, has been changed from 104 to 164. So the value in J7 has been updated. And in fact the value of any other cell that depends on the value in H7 will be updated automatically as well.
Now one of the things you may not be happy about is you may be squinting at the screen saying, “I can barely see those numbers. They’re so small.” If you refer now to the bar at the bottom of the screen, it’s called the Status Bar, I mentioned it earlier on. At the right hand end of there is a Zoom control and the zoom control takes the form of a bar. It’s got a minus at the end and a plus at the right and it says 100%. I can actually zoom in on my worksheet to make everything look bigger. Now this is only how things look. It doesn’t physically change the size of the cells. It just makes them appear bigger or smaller. And of course you can adjust this zoom control to suit the particular situation that you’re in.
If I want to zoom in to make things appear bigger if I click on the plus sign once I’m zoomed in to 110%. Let’s do it again and again and again and so on. And I can zoom in as far as I like to make things look bigger and easier to follow. If I had a lot of information in a lot of cells I may want to zoom out to be able to see more of the contents of the worksheet.
I’ll be looking at the zoom control in more detail later on but once you have zoomed in if you need to move around to the left and right or up and down to see other content in the sheet you have these two scroll controls. You have a scroll control at the bottom that lets you move from left to right and you have a scroll control on the right that lets you move up and down.
Want More? Get Started With a Free Excel 2016 Course! Click Here
If you want to reset everything back to 100% zoom all you need to do is to double click in the middle of the zoom control and it goes back to 100%.
Having made some changes to this workbook I will normally want to save the changes. I don’t want to do a Save As. I’m not going to save it with a new name. I’m happy with the name Demo 1 for the moment. I just want to save my work. There is an option in Backstage View, Save, but there is also a Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar at the top left. If I hover over there it says Save. Click on Save and this latest version of the workbook is now saved.
On this occasion I’m not going to close the workbook. I’m going to leave it open. I’m aware of the dangers of leaving it open. But I’m also going to create a new workbook. Now there are a number of ways of creating a new workbook. One of them is to go into Backstage View and click on New. And you can see a list of templates very similar to the list we saw before but now we’re on specifically a new page. I’m going to once again choose a blank workbook. So click Workbook and I’ve now got a new blank workbook. Its name defaults to Book 2. And what I’m going to do on this workbook is to put the names of the months of the year in it.
So there’s the first one. I’ve just typed the name in. Let me type in the second one. Now I’m going to go back to the first one and I’m going to use that little blob in the bottom corner of the selection box there and I’m going to drag down for a total of twelve cells. Watch what happens. What Excel 2016 automatically does for me is to do what’s called a Series Fill. Now I should warn you that some of these things people give different names to but this is a series fill and it’s already realized from what I put in the first two cells that I wanted to do a series of months. So the fact that I typed January, February it said, “Oh what you want here is March, April, May, June, July, etcetera.” If when it did what it did, it did something I didn’t want to I have a facility where I can automatically undo what it has done.
Now the Undo button is one of the buttons that’s usually on the Quick Access Toolbar and it’s to the right of the Save button. So there’s Save and there’s Undo. And I’m going to undo that autofill. Perhaps I thought, “No that’s not what I intended.” But I then say, “Oh hang on a minute. That is what I intended.” To the right of the Undo there is a Redo, Redo Autofill and that redoes what just happened. So I’m back to where I was before now.
Let me just summarize the current situation. At the moment we have Excel 2016 running and we have two workbooks open. We have Demo 1 open with saved changes and we have a second workbook open. It still has its default name of Book 2 and the changes in that, the sequence of month names, hasn’t been saved. So let’s close Book 2 and see what happens. And on this occasion I’m going to use the Close button up in the top right hand corner here. Excel says, “Do you want to save changes to Book 2?” I do so I click on Save. I browse to my course files folder and I’m going to call this book Monthly Accounts.xlsx. Click on Save and that book is saved and closed. If I now want to close Demo 1, remember that I have saved these changes, if I use that Close button up on the top right again, as soon as I click on Close it’s all closed and I’m not asked anything about saving changes because there are no unsaved changes.
Now when I’ve closed Excel I’m back to my Windows 10 desktop again. If I use the Excel icon, the shortcut down there on my Windows 10 taskbar Excel opens. I see the start screen. And note now that my two workbooks appear in the recent files list. And if I want to open one of them again all I need to do is to click on it to open it and continue to work on that particular workbook.
Want More? Get Started With a Free Excel 2016 Course! Click Here
Well I’ve really given you a whistle stop tour of some of the main features of Excel in this section and the previous one. We’re going to now have a few short sections with some very important information, more background information about using Excel, some of the important features that you’re going to need throughout the rest of the course, and then we’re going to come back and look at each of the aspects of Excel that you’ve seen already in a lot more detail and we’ll start to look at even more features of Excel. But that’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
