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.

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.

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.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment