Excel 2019 Bible

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Introduction

Software Versions

This book was written for the desktop version of Microsoft® Excel 2019 for Windows. Please

note that this book is not applicable to Microsoft® Excel for Mac.

Excel is available in several versions, including a web version and a version for tablets and

phones. Though this book was written for the desktop version of Excel, much of the infor-

mation here will also apply to the web and tablet versions. Excel 2016 and Excel 2013 users

will also find the information in this book relevant.

If you are using the Office 365 version of Excel, you may very well see features in your ver-

sion of Excel that are not covered here. Over the last few years, Microsoft has adopted an

agile release cycle, releasing updates to Office 365 practically on a monthly basis. This is

great news for those who love seeing new features added to Excel. It’s not so great if you’re

trying to document the features of these tools in a book.

Our assumption is that Microsoft will continue to add new bells and whistles to Excel at a

rapid pace after publication of this book. Thus, you may encounter new functionality not

covered in this book. That being said, Excel has a broad feature set, much of which is stable

and here to stay. So, even though changes will be made to Excel, they won’t be so drastic

as to turn this book into a doorstop. The core functionality covered in these chapters will

remain relevant—even if the mechanics change a bit.

Conventions Used in This Book

Take a minute to scan this section to learn some of the typographical and organizational

conventions that this book uses.

Excel commands

Excel uses a context-sensitive Ribbon system. The words along the top (such as File, Insert,

Page Layout, and so on) are known as tabs. Click a tab, and the Ribbon displays the com-

mands for the selected tab. Each command has a name, which is (usually) displayed next

to or below the icon. The commands are arranged in groups, and the group name appears at

the bottom of the Ribbon.

The convention we use is to indicate the tab name, followed by the group name, followed

by the command name. So, the command used to toggle word wrap within a cell is indicated

as follows:

Home ➪ Alignment ➪ Wrap Text

You’ll learn more about the Ribbon user interface in Chapter 1, “Introducing Excel.”

Typographical conventions

Anything that you’re supposed to type using the keyboard appears in a bold monospaced

font. Lengthy input usually appears on a separate line. Here’s an example:

="Part Name: " &VLOOKUP(PartNumber,PartList,2)