The Mathematics of Money

Copyright © 2008, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

With the mouse, click on cell A1 and hold the button down when you do.

Then with the mouse, move the cursor all the way to D5. (This will highlight the area

we are using for the spreadsheet.)

Select (click on) the Format menu from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Select Column from that menu.

This will bring you to yet another menu, and from that one select Autofi t Selection.

This will automatically adjust the widths of the columns to fi t the contents of the

cells.

The result should be a much more manageable looking, as you can see here.

1

2

3

4

5

A B C D

Product Units Sold Unit Price

Solar Singing Fish Gutter

Home Crash Test Kit

Twelve Tone Door Chime

To tals

Product Sales

In the original version, which we saw back in Figure 5.1, all of the text was centered

inside the cells. We can make this happen by once again highlighting the area we are

using. Most likely there will be three buttons in the toolbar at the top of your screen,

one of which shows text all justifi ed to the right, one of which shows it centered, and

one of which shows it justifi ed to the left. If you click on the one with the text cen-

tered, it will format the cells you have highlighted so that their contents will be cen-

tered. If those buttons are not on your toolbar, you can do this by selecting the Format

menu, then Cells, then Alignment, then Horizontal, then Center. (From here on in,

we’ll indicate a string of menu selections like this: Format Cells Alignment

Horizontal Center.)

To make the text in row 1 bold, you can highlight that row, and then either hit the bold

“B” button from the toolbar, or use Format Cells Font Font Style Bold. You can

bold A5 in the same way.

Now, to the numbers. Type in the Units Sold (cells B2, B3, and B4) and Unit Price (cells

C2, C3, and C4) values. Your resulting spreadsheet will look like the one here.

1

2

3

4

5

A B C

Product Units Sold Unit Price

Solar Singing Fish Gutter

Home Crash Test Kit

Twelve Tone Door Chime

Totals

Product Sales

D

1800

880

500

23.95

127.95

44.99

To format the cells in the Unit Price column to look like money, highlight these cells and

then use Format Cells Number Currency 2 decimal places.

Now, moving on to the formulas in column D, in D2, we want the program to multiply

the contents of B2 by the contents of C2. To do this, enter “
B2*C2” in that cell. (The “
”

is necessary to tell the program that we are entering a formula. Without it, the program will

think you want it to store the text “B2*C2” and will display that text in the cell.) Once you

hit enter, the cell should display the result, 43200.

For D3 and D4 we want the spreadsheet to do the same thing. Rather than type a similar

formula into each cell, we can copy what we did in D2. To do this, highlight D2 and then

Edit Copy (or click on the copy icon from the toolbar.) Then, highlight D3 and D4 and

5.1 Using Spreadsheets: An Introduction 211