Day 1: Excel Basics & Navigation

Excel supports 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns (columns go up to XFD). In practice, performance degrades well before you hit these limits — for datasets over 500,000 rows, Power Query or a database is a better choice.

A workbook is the entire Excel file (.xlsx). A worksheet (or sheet) is a single tab within that workbook. One workbook can contain many worksheets. By default, a new workbook opens with one worksheet named "Sheet1".

Ctrl+End moves the cursor to the last used cell in the worksheet — the intersection of the last row and last column that contain data or formatting. This is the quickest way to understand the extent of your dataset. If it jumps far beyond your data, you likely have stray formatting or data in unexpected cells.

The Name Box is the field at the top-left of the screen that shows the address of the currently selected cell (e.g. A1, B5). You can type any cell address or named range into it and press Enter to navigate directly there — faster than scrolling. You can also use it to select a range: type B2:D100 and press Enter to select that entire range.

Pressing Delete or Backspace clears the content of a cell but leaves the cell in place — no other cells move. Right-clicking → Delete Cell removes the cell entirely and shifts surrounding cells up or left to fill the gap. In a structured dataset, accidentally deleting cells (rather than content) can misalign your data in ways that are hard to spot.