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.

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.

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.

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.

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.




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