Excel 2007: Introductory Tutorial

This tutorial is for the first discussion section in Economics 102. It focuses on key parts of the handouts that give more details.
Steps 1-5 cover Excel basics. Some of you will know this.
Step 6. covers initial use of Excel for this course: hitogram, chart and descriptive statistics.

1. GETTING STARTED IN THE COMPUTER LAB
a. Login to computer (use your university account and password).
b. Go to my Economics 102 webpage and see what is there
    http://cameron.econ.ucdavis.edu/e102/e102.html
c. Go to my Excel webpage and see what is there
    http://cameron.econ.ucdavis.edu/excel/excel.html

2. GETTING STARTED IN EXCEL 2007
a. Open Excel (hit Icon or from Start Menu | Programs)
b. Select the Data Tab (the fifth tab after Home, Insert, page layout, Formulas)
    - If you see Data Analysis as an option (at the far right) do nothing
    - If Data Analysis is not displayed then you need to activate the Analysis Toolpack.
       For details see Excel 2007: Access and Documentation]

3. INPUT SOME DATA
This can be more difficult than you think,
The Excel worksheet is a grid with each entry called a cell.
Read Excel 2007: Data Types and Data Input to do the following:
a. Enter the data in manually (easy)
b. Read in data from excel workbook (easy)
     Excel 2007: Sample Excel worksheet (carsdata.xls)
c. Copy from an existing Excel worksheet (harder)
d. Read in data from an existing text file (hardest)
    See 4. Read in Data from an existing text file.
    Read data from file Excel 2007: Sample text data set (carsdata.txt)

4. MANIPULATE DATA
This is the key function of a spreadsheet program!
Read Excel 2007: Data Manipulation to do the following
a. Start with the cars data with headers in the first row.
      Excel 2007: Sample Excel worksheet (carsdata.xls)
b. Create cars per person data for second row
c. Cut and paste to create cars per person for rows 3 to 6.
d. Understand relative versus absolute cell references (C2 versus $C$2)
e. Read rest on selecting, highlighting, deleting.

5. FORMATTING, SAVING, PRINTING and COPYING
(Skip for now if low on time and move to 6.)
Read Excel 2007: Formatting, Saving, Printing and Copying Results

6. DATA ANALYSIS
For assignment 1 need to do each of the following
a. Histogram using Tools | Data Analysis | Histogram
    Note - it can be tricky defining the bins.
    See Excel 2007: Histogram
b. Chart using Chart Wizard (icon on seconf Excel menu bar)
    See Excel 2007: Charts (column, pie, line)
c. Descriptive statistics using Tools | Data Analysis | Descriptive Statistics
    See Excel 2007: Descriptive Statistics

End Tutorial

A. Colin Cameron / UC-Davis Economics / http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/cameron