Excel provides a wide assortment of number formats that lets you change the appearance of the contents of different cells.  You can change the colour, size, font and formatting of individual cells, mush as you can do with and MS Office product (like MS Word, for example).  But Excel also allows to you format any given cell as currency, or as a percent, or even to increase or decrease the number of decimal places in a number.

Most of these routine formatting can be done via the toolbars.

You should be familiar with these tools which also appear on the MS Word toolbars.

Although hyperliks are used in Word, the rest of these functions will be new to you.  Autosum adds up all cells IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING the current cell.  It stops at the first blank cell.  Try it.  The "Paste Function" button allows you to brows all the functions for the one you want.  And the two sort button tools will sort the currently selected cells.

This toolbar contains the familiar ZOOM tool, allows you access to some rudimentary drawing tools, but FAR more interestingly, allows you to invoke the Chart Wizard - which will convert your data into pretty pictures.  The following lesson deals with charting in more detail.