To the left, you will find links to each main menu in the user interface.  On these pages are an explanation of the options under each and the equivalent commands in VBA, which may be useful if you are trying to build code and know the menu options you want to replicate.e.

It is important to know that any selection in Excel that is going to execute an action which has three ellipsis (...) after the command will not execute it directly, but will show another dialog before doing so.  This is often important when you are nervous that pressing the button may change everything you have done! Menu options with an arrow (►), have another sub-menu that will show when you move over it. (These are shown in the 'type' column on the individual menu pages on this site)

The user interface in Excel is, quite obviously, the 'front-end' of Excel and the first thing you see when you open it.

It consists of the 'application window' which contains all the toolbars and menus, (think of it as the outer window), and the 'workbook window' (file), (think of this as the inner window), which contains all the worksheets, chart sheets, etc.

 Both of these windows can be re-sized, maximised, minimised, etc independently using their own control buttons at the top right of the window.

(Window control buttons).

Equally you can close a 'workbook window' (file), without closing the Excel 'application window'. On the other hand a single Excel 'application window', can have multiple 'workbook windows' (files) open at once or even multiple versions of the same 'workbook window' (file).

Most users will not wish or need to move beyond it, into VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Indeed most users will only use around 20% of it's features.

Hopefully, by using the navigation on the left, which 'mirrors' the standard menu layout in Excel 97 up, you will get a fuller idea of what the various menu options provide and perhaps realise Excel has some pretty neat features that may become useful on a more regular basis.

When you first open excel you are presented with a default workbook (named book1.xls) and if you keep opening files the number appended to the end will increment by one each time (book2.xls, book3.xls, etc).

Below I have outlined some of the features of the user interface itself and some of the customisations that can be made to it. To ease this you will need to familiarise yourself with the names of some items in the image below.

Worksheet Menu Bar contains the menus and sub menus for all operations that can be performed within Excel, they can be clicked on to activate or used with the Alt key and underlined letter. Some sub menu options also show 'hot key' combinations that can be used as a shortcut directly to the menu option. (example Crtl+S saves the current workbook directly, it is not a shortcut to the menu/sub-menu). Since Excel 2002 (XP), the menus accessed from the worksheet menu bar have been 'adaptive' by default.  That is they start by only showing the most-used commands  and as you use the features, they show your most used features.  If you hover the mouse on any menu after you click on it, they will expand to show all commands.  This feature can also be switched off and reset in the customisation dialog box.

Adaptive menus...

Standard Toolbar has clickable buttons which carry out common tasks with a single mouse click.  The ability to interact like this with a program is the core of the success of Windows and the GUI (Graphic User Interface).  This toolbar carries in it's standard configuration all the common Excel tasks such as opening a file, closing one, auto summing, etc. Like all Excel toolbars the buttons it contains can be customised.

Formatting Toolbar like all other toolbars, has clickable buttons for most of the common formatting options available in Excel such as Font type, size, weight, colour, formatting of cells for currency, percent, etc.

Customising Toolbars and Menus Excel carries far more toolbars than the two above which are installed as standard with Excel. The user can add any of these toolbars by simply right-clicking on any existing toolbar and selecting one from the list.  Most of these toolbars can be 'docked' at the top, sides or bottom of the application window, by simply dragging them with the mouse from their current position using the 'drag handles' at the far left end of any toolbar.  They can also be left 'floating' in the middle of the window if desired. These customised settings are retained in a special file, (Excel.xlb), so that they are retained between sessions of Excel. (This file is saved in a folder called XLStart and may be hidden.  From time to time this file may get corrupted. This manifests itself by Excel being slow to open, firing error messages or opening the application, but not the workbook. To correct this, find and move the file Excel.xlb and open Excel, (It will create a new one), if that fixes the issue you can proceed to delete the old one, obviously, all customisations will be lost) It is often not necessary to add many toolbars to Excel as they are also task-specific, meaning that if you, for example, create a pivot table, the pivot table toolbar will show automatically.

The buttons on the toolbars can also be customised by right-clicking on any toolbar and selecting customize... While this dialog is showing you can drag icons from toolbars to the box to remove them and drag them from the box to the toolbar to add them.  You can additionally, under the 'Options' tab in this dialog, switch off the adaptive feature of menus, demonstrated above.

Customising the toolbar buttons can be done whilst the customize... dialog is showing by right-clicking on any existing toolbar button. It is suggested you don't alter any of the built in ones, so Excel provides a default 'smiley face' icon which you can add and customise.  It is this type of activity that allows you to assign toolbar buttons to macros you have recorded or code you have written. (This would be carried out by right-clicking on the new button (whilst the dialog is showing) and selecting Assign macro...).

Formula Bar is where you can enter formulae in Excel.  I stress 'can' as you can equally well enter them directly in a cell or via the formula dialog. (Which can be accessed by pressing the insert function (Fx) button). A formula in the formula bar can be quickly accessed by putting Excel in 'edit' mode, simply press the F2 key. If via Format>Cells...>Protection, you mark any cells as 'Hidden' and then protect the worksheet, thet formula will not show in the formula bar.

Name Box shows many things depending on what you are currently doing.

1. The reference of the currently selected (active) cell

2. While selecting the size of the selected range in R1C1 notation, for instance while you select the range A1:C15 it will show 15R x 3C. (15 rows by 3 columns).  This is a good way of counting rows and columns in functions, etc.

3. Setting up of 'range names' which can be later referred to in formulae, etc. Simply select the range and click in the box, type the name (no spaces) and press enter.  This is a great shortcut for Edit>Name>Define...

4. Shows or allows selection of range names already setup in the workbook/worksheet.

You may notice that Excel automatically sets range names in here for things such as the print_area, (accessed from File>Print Area>Set Print Area), data_range when importing data, etc.

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