What is your best tip for using MIcrosoft Excel?

[susans]

Recently we did Microsoft Word, let's do Excel!   What is your best tip for using MIcrosoft Excel?

[jennika]

My favorite tip are down fills and right fills.   By typing in Jan in one cell, Feb in the next then filling right, left or how ever you have all your months typed for you!  This same tip can be used for any pattern.  

[suis]

Wow 15 new sound offs!  I haven't logged on in awhile.   Here is a tip I use:

Shift+Windows+M
Undo minimize all open windows

[viviennenoyle]

The fee earning staff at my office, being accountants, are all trained in using Excel as a calculating tool, so are far better than me with formulas etc.  However, for making it actually look tidy, most aren't so good, and one tip that I have to pass on quite regularly is how to get a blank background with no gridlines.  This being select > right click > format cells > patterns > choose colour.  I think they're thrown by the fact that it's called "patterns" in Excel and "fill" in Word or Powerpoint.  For anything that's going to be printed, it doesn't matter, but if the spreadsheet is being inserted into Powerpoint, you have to do this or you get visible gridlines when printed.  We have so many reports and presentations in Powerpoint with Excel worksheets inserted into them, that this one is actually quite important.

[susan silva]

Going to leave this topic up for one more day!  We MUST have someone who has an excel tip!  Excel can be complicated but must be something  you do that you think is cool.  

[gee4]

I guess for me when assisting others the Page Break option is the one that is requested the most but known the least.  

In Print Preview, select Page Break Preview and then adjust as necessary.  Non-excel experts have no idea how to use this or work it but require it daily.

[msmarieh]

There's tons of tips and tricks in Excel!

The afore-mentioned autofill feature is especially useful.

I also adore filters - which allow you to screen rows to see just data that meets your criteria and conditional formatting - which modifies the formatting of your cell when it meets certain criteria (i.e. turning the background red when a date is past due or a budget number is exceeded).

Another extremely useful (and underutilized) feature is GoTo. Not the first screen that comes up which allows you to go to a particular cell, but the link to Special on the GoTo screen that then allows you to select all cells with formulas, all cells with data validation / conditional formatting / etc. Way useful and yet so few people know about it!

Finally, I really love Paste Special which allows you to not only paste links to data but also apply mathematical functions or transpose columns.

Marie

[theresa_granados]

Pivot Tables have made me the star of the company. I use that alot for analyzing sales data.

[gee4]

Actually we use stuff every day but it just doesn't register that it's a tip.

I used one earlier today.

Spreadsheet of data, amongst which were contact mobile nos.  All entries had the zeros missing at the beginning of the number.  To fix -

- Highlight the Cells
- Choose Format Cells
- Select Custom
- In the Custom box type 7 zeros

Your list should return the zeros at the beginning of each mobile number.

[natbro]

gee4, I used this one today on a huge spreadsheet of our company mobile numbers with the zeros missing and it was fab thanks for the tip!

My fav formula is VLOOKUP, looks really complicated but is dead simple and a great way of populating a generic spreadsheet with your own data.