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.

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.

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.

One annoyance is that when you add a great deal of data and you start to move below about the 38th row, you lose the visibility of your header. That might be fine if you just have two or three columns of data, but if you are entering data into a large amount of columns, it is sometimes tough to remember which column is which. For this reason, it is nice to have the header visible all of the time.

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.

Microsoft Excel offers hundreds of short-cuts and functions, including the ability sort data or filter data. To sort, you can go up to the Sort & Filter function on the Home tab. This allows you to sort alphabetically, reverse alphabetically or to create your own custom sort. You also can place a filter in order to view just one set of data at a time. The best way to learn about all of the functions of Excel is to click on the question mark in the blue circle that is located on the top right corner of your Excel spreadsheet. From here, you will be linked to the Excel Help system. You can ask questions, learn keyboard shortcuts and more.




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