Methods of Selecting Cells

Methods of Selecting Cells

Selecting cells in an equation is a very important concept of a spreadsheet. 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 let's 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 to A3
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 on B3
A1, A2, B1, B2	A1:B2	click on A1 with button down drag to B2

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