From the previous section, you now have a spreadsheet that looks like this:
If we're eating that many chocolate bars in one week, we'd like to know how much this habit is costing us! And what about the yearly cost of the addiction? Excel makes sums like this quite easy to calculate. First let's have some new headings.
Copy and Paste
To create your new headings, do this:
- Locate cell A13 on your spreadsheet and click on it
- Type Cost of Addiction
- Merge the cells, in the same way you learned previously
- Add a bit of formatting to the text, if you like
We're going to be needing the names of the chocolate bars again. These will go in cells A15 to A18. Instead of typing them all out by hand, Excel 2007 and Excel 2010 make it easy to copy and paste the names. Try this:
- Highlight the cells A4, A5, A6 and A7
- Locate the Clipboard panel in the Ribbon at the top of the page (on the Home menu)
- From the Clipboard panel, click Copy
You'll see some moving lines surrounding your highlighted cells - the so-called marching ants!
- Once you see the marching ants, click into cell A15
- To paste the copied text over, simply press the Enter key on your keyboard
- You spreadsheet should now look something like ours below:
We need some new headings on the spreadsheet. Under these headings will be the price of each chocolate bar, how many of a particular chocolate bar we're eating each week, and how much this is costing us each week. So, do the following:
- In cell B14 enter the word Price
- In cell C14 enter the word Number
- In cell D14 enter the word Cost
Your spreadsheet should now look like this:
We're going to put the price of each chocolate bar in cells B15, B16, B17 and B18. We'll have the following for the prices:
Mars Bars £0.35
Twix £0.29
Bounty £0.32
Others £0.40
Twix £0.29
Bounty £0.32
Others £0.40
So go ahead and enter those prices in cells B15, B16, B17 and B18 of your spreadsheet. (You can have your own currency symbol, instead of the UK pound.)
When you're finished, your spreadsheet should look like this one.
For the Number column, we'll use a different form of Paste called Paste Special. You'll see how that works in the next part of this Excel tutorial.