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Excel has great tools for manipulating, sorting, organizing, and charting all kinds of data. But before you can get started with the fun stuff, you first have to enter some data into Excel to work with, right? To get started with basic data entry, begin by reciting (all together now) its most basic rule:
To enter data in a worksheet, position the cell pointer in the cell where you want the data, and then begin typing the entry.
 | Note that before you can position the cell pointer in the cell where you want the entry, Excel must be in Ready mode (look to the lower left of your screen to make sure the word Ready appears at the beginning of the status bar). As soon as you start typing the entry, Excel changes from Ready mode to Enter mode. If you're not in Ready mode, try pressing Esc. |
As soon as you begin typing in Enter mode, the characters that you type appear both in a cell in the worksheet area and on the formula bar near the top of the screen just below the Excel toolbars. Starting to type something that's ultimately destined to go into the current cell also triggers a change to the Formula bar because two new boxes, Cancel and Enter, appear between the Name Box drop-down button and the Insert Function button.
As you continue to type, Excel displays your progress both on the formula bar and in the active cell in the worksheet (see Figure 1). However, the insertion point (the flashing vertical bar that acts as your cursor) appears only at the end of the characters displayed in the cell.
Figure 1: What you type appears both in the current cell and on the Formula bar.
| After you finish typing your cell entry, you still have to get it into the cell so that it stays put. To complete your cell entry and get Excel out of Enter mode and back into Ready mode, click the Enter box (the one with the check mark) on the Formula bar or press the Enter key. You can also press the Tab or Shift+Tab keys to complete a cell entry. |
Although all the following alternatives get your text into the cell, each one does something a little different afterwards:
- If you click the Enter box on the Formula bar, the text goes into the cell, and the cell pointer just stays in the cell containing the brand-new entry.
- If you press the Enter key on your keyboard, the text goes into the cell, and the cell pointer moves down to the cell below in the next row.
- If you press Tab, the text goes into the cell, and the cell pointer moves to the adjacent cell in the column on the immediate right. If you press Shift+Tab, the cell pointer moves to the adjacent cell in the column on the immediate left after putting in the text.
No matter which method you choose when putting an entry in its place, as soon as you complete your entry in the current cell, Excel deactivates the Formula bar by removing the Cancel and Enter boxes. Thereafter, the data you entered continues to appear in the cell in the worksheet. Every time you put the cell pointer into that cell, the data reappears on the Formula bar as well.
If, prior to completing a cell entry, you realize that you're just about to stick it in the wrong cell, you can clear and deactivate the Formula bar by clicking the Cancel box (the one with the X in it) or by pressing Esc. If, however, you don't realize that you had the wrong cell current until after you've entered your data there, you have to move the entry to the correct cell. To move the entry, just select its cell and click the Cut button or press Ctrl+X. Move the cursor to the data's new destination and paste it there by clicking the Paste button or pressing Ctrl+V.
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