Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Helpful Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks

By Frankline Bell


Microsoft Excel is one of those programs that is far more versatile than many people believe. Certainly it allows you to enter and analyze data, but you also can use it for accounting, planning, tracking data, making calendars, creating a budget and much more. While many people know how to use the most basic features of Excel, here are a few cool tricks that you might not have known.

Sometimes when you have a spreadsheet filled with data, you need to move an entire row into another space. To select the entire row quickly, simply click in the row and then hit shift and the spacebar. This will highlight the row, and then you can cut the row entirely or paste it elsewhere on that spreadsheet or another spreadsheet.

When you need more that a single row or column highlighted and you need the whole spreadsheet, this is easy as well. Go up to the first cell and click. Now you hit the key at the top of your keyboard marked F8. Then you scroll down to the very last cell of data and click inside it. This will highlight your whole spreadsheet. If you just want to highlight one column, you begin by clicking the first cell in the column and then click the last cell in that column rather than clicking the first and last cells in the entire spreadsheet. To stop this particular function, simply tap that F8 key again.

Often when you are working on a spreadsheet and you start entering data farther down the sheet, you miss having the header visible. If you have many columns of data, it's difficult to remember what data goes into what cell, so having the header constantly visible would be helpful.

Fortunately, you can address the problem quickly. First look at the top right area of your spreadsheet, over by where the scroll bar is located. Above that you will notice two arrows, one is thin and points down and the other is full and points up. However your cursor between these two arrows on the little box in between. Your cursor will transform from a plus sign or arrow into an up and down arrows with two lines in the middle of them. Click and then gently drag down until you see a duplicate header appear and then stop dragging. The very top header will remain visible no matter how far down you scroll on your main spreadsheet page.

If you need to organize data a certain way, you can use the handy sort function. At the top of the page, you will notice a variety of tabs - Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc. Under Home, you will find Sort & Filter. You can create your own custom sorts or just go with alphabetical sorts. You can also filter columns to show just certain data which can be very helpful. This is just the tip of the iceberg as there are literally hundreds of shortcuts and functions available in Excel. For more help and hints, click on the question mark at the top of the Excel page. It is surrounded by a blue arrow and links to the Microsoft Excel help system.




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