Excel 97: 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 DSS LAB
a. Login to computer (use your university account and password).
b. Go to my Economics 102 webpage and see what is there
    http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/cameron/e102/e102.html
c. Go to my Excel webpage and see what is there
    http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/cameron/excel/excel.html

2. GETTING STARTED IN EXCEL
a. Open Excel (hit Icon or from Start Menu | Programs)
b. Select the Tools dragdown menu on the top Excel menu
    - If you see Data Analysis as on option do nothing
    - If Data Analysis is not an option then select Add-ins and check Analysis Toolpack and hit OK
[If need more details see Excel: 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: 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: Sample Excel worksheet (cars.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: Sample text data set (cars.asc)

4. MANIPULATE DATA
This is the key function of a spreadsheet program!
Read Excel: Data Manipulation to do the following
a. Start with the cars data with headers in the first row.
      Excel: Sample Excel worksheet (cars.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: 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: Histogram
b. Chart using Chart Wizard (icon on seconf Excel menu bar)
    See Excel: Charts (bar, column, pie, line)
c. Descriptive statistics using Tools | Data Analysis | Descriptive Statistics
    See Excel: Descriptive Statistics

End Tutorial

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