Open Excel
Now let’s start at the beginning! (It’s often the best place to start…) If you want to use Excel, you first need to open the application. You can do this in one of two ways:
Open Excel from your desktop.
Open Excel from the Windows Start menu.
Open Excel From Your Desktop
Simply double-click the Excel icon 
on your desktop.
Open Excel From the Windows Start Menu
Click on the Start button 
in the bottom left corner of your screen.
On the Start menu that pops up, the apps you have installed on your computer will appear in alphabetical order.
Scroll down to “E” to find Excel.
Create a New Workbook
When you open Excel, this is what you’ll see:
You can now create a new workbook or use an existing template.
You can browse the available templates by clicking New in the green menu on the left.
In the lower part of the window, you can choose from dozens of different templates.
Okay, but what if I don’t want to use a template? I want to create my own workbook! How do I do that?
No problem! Click on New in the upper part of the window or Blank workbook on the welcome screen.
And this is what you get!
You've just created your first workbook.
Save Your Workbook
Now that you're in your Excel workbook, you're going to save it.
To save a workbook, click on the Save icon.
Save your workbook using the Save icon
Once you've clicked on the Save icon, this dialog box will appear:
This name now appears in the File name section, as you can see here:
Before saving your workbook, you also need to choose where the file will be saved.
For now, let’s just save your file on your computer.
To do this, click on the Choose a Location drop-down list.
Then click on the Documents folder, followed by the Save button.
Good news: your file is now saved in the Documents folder on your computer. 🥳
Now that you’ve saved your workbook for the first time, if you click on the Save icon again, you won’t see the dialogue box again. It will just update the file with anything you’ve added since the last time you saved it.
Try saving a new workbook in your Documents folder using the keyboard shortcut to see if it speeds things up for you!
Close Your Excel Workbook
Now that you've created and saved your first workbook, let’s close it.
Click on the File tab:
Then, click Close in the green menu on the left.
Watch the Video Tutorial
Watch a step-by-step recap of everything described in this chapter in the tutorial below:
Let’s Recap!
To open Excel, you can:
double-click the Excel shortcut on your desktop.
click the Excel icon in the Start menu.
To save an Excel workbook, click on the Save
icon on the Quick Access toolbar.To close a workbook, click on the File tab and then on Close.
By clicking on the Close button
, you’ll close your workbook and exit from Excel.
Congratulations, you've just created your first workbook! Follow me to the next chapter to create your first file.
