Monday, July 21, 2014

Helpful Microsoft Excel Tips & Tricks

By Frankline Bell


If you have Microsoft Office installed on your home computer, this means you have a copy of Microsoft Excel. This is a highly versatile program offering more than for its user than simply being a program for data entry. It is an excellent accounting tool; you can use it to create budgets and calendars, as well as for planning and many other tasks. While you might not be aware of some of the basic features, read on to discover a few helpful tricks and shortcuts.

If you have entered many rows and columns of data but need to copy and paste it someplace else, such as another spreadsheet, most of us click, hold and drag to select all of the information. If you have a large amount of data, this can be time consuming. To skip that, just click inside the row and tap the shift key and the spacebar. This will highlight the whole row automatically, which you can then cut, copy or paste elsewhere.

For those times when you need to highlight a whole column, just click in the first cell and then find the F8 key at the top of your keyboard. Then click that F8 and then click last cell in your column. You also can use this process to highlight every cell in a spreadsheet. Just click in that very first cell and then in the very last cell and everything will highlight. To end this function, just tap on that F8 again and the function will stop. You also can use this to just highlight a chunk of data within your spreadsheet.

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.

When you are analyzing data or just need to look at data of a specific criterion, then the ability to sort and filter can be handy. Microsoft excel has a function just for this purpose located along with many other features on the Home tab. This provides you with the ability to sort items alphabetically, to create a custom sort or to filter for specific terms or information. To learn more about Microsoft Excel, there is a help function built into the program located near the top right part of the program. It is a question mark located in a blue circle. This allows you to browse for answers to questions, learn shortcuts and other helpful hints.




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