Formula Bar and Name Box

My Courses Data Visualization in Excel Excel Navigation Formula Bar and Name Box

Lesson map

You’ve created your workbook and sheet and you’re familiar with the Ribbon.

This topic, we will learn about the Formula Bar. This will be key to helping Emily build her dashboard.

The Formula bar is located below the ribbon above the worksheet. It’s main purpose is to show you the actual formula applied to a cell as opposed to just the result of the formula.

We will be covering formulas in the next lesson – we are just showing you where to to see the formula so you’re familiar with the layout.

Watch this video to find out more about the Formula Bar. Heads up – there will be some questions in the video to keep you on your toes :-).

When we start to enter data into our sheet, normally we would look at the formula bar as this will become very handy.

Remember that the Name Box holds the name of whatever the active cell is.
See the green outline on any active cell you click on? That we call the AutoFill Handle. In the next topic we’ll see all the cool stuff you can do with it, shortcutting tasks that might take too long otherwise.