Friday 18 July 2014

Tricks & Tips For Those Using Microsoft Excel

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.

Highlighting data is something we often have to do, especially if you need to cut and paste or copy and paste the data. To highlight quickly, tap into the first cell of a row and just hit your shift and spacebar. The whole row will highlight and you can copy or cut the data.

If you need to highlight all the data on an entire spreadsheet, such as if you wish to copy or cut all the data and move it someplace else, there is a much easier way to do this than dragging your mouse across all the cells of data. You just click in the first cell and then hit F8. From there, you just click on the last cell of the spreadsheet, and all of the cells will be highlighted. You can do this for just one column or the whole spreadsheet. When you want this function to cease, just hit F8 again.

You might have noticed that once you move beyond row 38 in excel, that you can no longer see the first row of data. As this is your header, it can be difficult to continue entering data when you can't see for what each column has been designated. Keeping a header in place is a helpful tool for those using Excel.

To make sure the header appears all the time, you need to look at the right edge of the spreadsheet. There is a small down arrow, then a little box with a dash in it, and then a filled-in up arrow. If you hover over the little box, your cursor will change to an up and down arrow with two horizontal lines. Click and hold and move the bar that appears down until it appears below the header row. This will appear as if you have two headers, but notice as you scroll down that the top header remains.

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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