Your first spreadsheet: open, look, scroll

By the end of this lesson you can open the market stall data in Google Sheets and move around it with confidence.

Why it matters

Pictures of tables are a good start, but real work happens in a real tool. Spreadsheets like Google Sheets and Excel are the everyday tool of almost every data job, and that is where this course takes you next. Today you open a spreadsheet and make it do what you want.

The idea in plain words

A spreadsheet is a giant table on a screen. It already has the letters along the top and the numbers down the side that you met last lesson. You can pour data into it, and it keeps every value in its own cell.

Spreadsheet: a computer program (or file) that holds data in a grid of cells. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are spreadsheets.

Dataset: a whole table of data about one subject, saved together, such as Amara's week of sales.

CSV file: a plain text file that holds a table. The name means "comma-separated values": each line is a row, and commas split it into cells.

In this course you use Google Sheets. It is free and runs in a web browser, so there is nothing to install. You need a free Google account to use it.

Getting a dataset into Sheets takes five steps:

Five steps, about two minutes. You only learn them once.

See it done

Data: market-stall-week.csv, Amara's week of sales (synthetic). Download it from this lesson's page first.

Part 1: bring the data in.

1. Go to sheets.google.com and sign in.
2. Start a Blank spreadsheet.
3. Click File, then Import.
4. Click Upload, then choose market-stall-week.csv from your computer (or drag it into the box).
5. In the box that opens, set Import location to Replace spreadsheet. Leave Separator type on Detect automatically.
6. Click Import. (On some screens the button says Import data.)

The data appears. Row 1 holds the 8 column names. The sales start in row 2.

Part 2: keep the column names on screen.

7. Click View, then Freeze, then 1 row.

Now, when you scroll down, row 1 stays at the top. You always know which column is which.

Header row: the top row, which holds the column names instead of data.

Part 3: find the last row.

8. Press Ctrl + End on a Windows computer (on a Mac, press ⌘ Cmd + Fn + right arrow; on some Mac keyboards the Fn key shows a globe). Sheets jumps to the end of the data, the bottom-right cell. (You can also scroll down until the rows stop.)
9. Read the row number on the left: 61.
10. Look along row 61 to column A. The value in A61 is S060, the last sale.

So the sheet uses rows 1 to 61. Take away the 1 header row: 61 − 1 = 60 rows of data. One row is one sale, so Amara made 60 sales this week.

Row 1 is the header. Row 61 is the last sale. 61 − 1 = 60 sales.

Tip: Ctrl + Home (⌘ + Fn + left arrow on a Mac) jumps back to cell A1, the top-left corner.

Using Excel instead? In Excel for Microsoft 365, open the CSV file with File, Open, then use View, Freeze Panes, Freeze Top Row. Ctrl + End jumps to the last cell with data there too.

Your turn, with help

In your own sheet:

1. Click cell H61. What value is in it?
2. Click cell G2. What value is in it, and what does it mean?

Hint: look in the Name box at the top left to check you clicked the right cell. For question 2, check which column G is by looking at row 1.

Show the answer

1. Transfer. The last sale of the week was paid by bank transfer.
2. 1200. Column G is price_each_naira, and row 2 is sale S001, a pawpaw. So one pawpaw costs ₦1,200.

Your turn, alone

In your own sheet:

1. What fruit was sold in the very first sale of the week (row 2)?
2. Look along row 1 to the last column name. Which column letter is it, and what is its name?
3. What day of the week is the last sale (row 61)?
4. Scroll so row 40 is near the top of your screen. Can you still see the column names? If not, what step did you miss?

Check your answers

1. Pawpaw (cell E2).
2. Column H, which is payment.
3. Sat (Saturday), cell C61.
4. You should still see them in row 1. If not, do step 7 again: View, Freeze, 1 row.

Watch out

• Counting the header as data. The last row number is 61, but there are 60 sales. Always take away the header row.
• Typing over a value by accident. If you type while a cell is selected, you replace what was there. Press Ctrl + Z (⌘ + Z on a Mac) to undo.
• Dates and times looking a little different. Sheets may show 2026-03-02 or 07:14 in your own country's style, or add seconds, such as 7:14:00. It is the same value, just dressed differently. Lesson 2.4 explains why.

Say it back

1. Which menu freezes the top row?
2. A sheet's last row of data is row 101, and row 1 is the header. How many rows of data are there?
3. What is a CSV file?

Show the answers

1. View, then Freeze, then 1 row.
2. 100.
3. A plain text file that holds a table: one line per row, commas between the cells.

What is next

Well done. You have opened a real dataset, kept it tidy and found your way to its last row. That ends Module 1. In Module 2 you meet Lucía's class survey, where some pupils left answers blank. Is a blank the same as zero? (It is not, and it matters more than you might think.)