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Spreadsheet Basics

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Basic Spreadsheet Vocabulary

5:37 with Michael Watson

Learn the basic vocabulary to make it easier to talk about and learn how to use spreadsheets.

Example Google Sheets

Vocabulary

  • Cell: the building blocks of a spreadsheet. Each cell holds one piece of data.
  • Row: a horizontal collection of cells. Each row is identified by a number on the left side of the row.
  • Column: a vertical collection of cells. Each column is identified by a letter at the top of the column.
  • Spreadsheet: the entire collection of data. Most spreadsheet programs like Excel, refer to this as a worksheet or workbook. Google just calls it a spreadsheet.
  • Tab: an organizational unit in a spreadsheet. You can think of them sort of like different pages in the spreadsheet.
  • Formula: an equation based on multiple cells.
  • Function: formulas that are built into your spreadsheet software are called functions.
  • Manual Input: user inputted data into a cell. The difference between manually inputted data versus a cell with a computed value will become increasingly clear over this course.
  • Output: a cell with a value that is calculated based on data in other cells. A function is an example of an output cell.

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    Learning this handful of words will make it a lot easier to talk about and 0:00
    learn how to use a spreadsheet. 0:01
    Let me teach the vocabulary using a real spreadsheet. 0:03
    If you'd like to follow along and explore the spreadsheet with me, you can open 0:06
    a copy of this spreadsheet by clicking the link in the Teacher's Notes below. 0:09
    This spreadsheet contains data on estimated population levels by country. 0:12
    The data source is the United Nations and starts in 1950 and goes through 2015. 0:17
    The data is in thousands. 0:21
    So, here for Burundi, in 1950, 0:24
    this would mean the estimated population then was 2,309,000. 0:26

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