Sunday, August 3, 2014

Microsoft Excel: Some Helpful Tips

By Frankline Bell


If you need to collect, store and analyze data, then Microsoft Excel is an obvious choice, but this versatile piece of software can do much more than just store basic data. You can create calendars in Excel, make mailing labels, compare data, record inventory, complete accounting tasks, create forms and quite a bit more. Excel also offer dozens of helpful tricks and shortcuts for users.

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.

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.

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.

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.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment