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Methods of Selecting Cells

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Selecting cells in an equation is a very important concept of aspreadsheet. We need to know how to reference the data in other parts of the spreadsheet. When entering your selection you may use the keyboard or the mouse.

We can select several cells together if we can specify a starting cell and a stopping cell. This will select ALL the cells within this specified BLOCK of cells.

If the cells that we want to work with are not together (non-contiguous cells) we can use the comma to separate the cells or by holding down the control-key (command key on a MAC) and selecting cells or blocks of cells the comma will be inserted automatically to separate these chunks of data.


For the following examples lets consider the table below:

  • A1 (column A, row 1) = 5
  • A2 (column A, row 2) = 7
  • A3 (column A, row 3) = 8
  • B1 (column B, row 1) = 3
  • B2 (column B, row 2) = 4
  • B3 (column B, row 3) = 6

 

A

B

1

5

3

2

7

4

3

8

6

This is just a discussion of selection methods. If we wanted to add the cells in the (To Select) you would type in

=sum(Type In)
or
=sum(Click On)


To Select

Type In

Click On

A1

A1

  • click on A1

A1, A2, A3

A1:A3

  • click on A1
  • with button down
  • drag toA3

A1, B1

A1:B1

  • click on A1
  • with button down
  • drag to B1

A1, B3

A1, B3

  • click on A1
  • type in comma
    (or hold down the control key on a PC)
    (or hold down the command key on a MAC)
  • click onB3

A1, A2, B1, B2

A1:B2

  • click on A1
  • with button down
  • drag toB2

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Methods of Selecting Cells

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