Excel Tips

Excel Tips

Look like the master of Excel with these easy tips

1. Freeze Panes. Have you ever scrolled through an excel sheet and wished that the column and row headings would scroll with you? They can. Simply go to View – Windows – Freeze Panes. It may take a few tries to get the exact result that you want. For further tips search Freeze Panes in the Help menu.

2. Landscape. It may sound silly but nothing is worse than printing out an excel sheet and expecting just 1 page and getting 2 or oh no 3. Most of the time if you change the page orientation to landscape many problems can be solved. Change the orientation by going to Page layout – Orientation – Landscape. Psssst, if you hit the print preview button and then click close, little dash lines appear where the page cutoffs are.

3. View Formulas. Ever wonder what formula is lurking in a cell? Press Ctrl and ~ at the same time. Excel will display the cell formulas in place of the results. But don’t worry the actual numbers are still there, just press the same combination again and excel will once again hide the formulas.

4. Wrap Text. Once a little known feature, the Microsoft Gods have now granted it premium real estate on the home tab in excel 2007. Wrap text makes all the text that you have typed in a given cell visible, usually by increasing the height of the cell. In older versions of excel the wrap text feature is still available select the cell you would like to wrap text in – right click – select format cells – then select the alignment tab – check the wrap text box.

5. Paste Special. Ok so there’s paste and this other thing called paste special which one do I use? Well, use paste when you just want to well paste. But let’s say that not only do you want to paste but you want the formula or the formatting of the cell to paste too. Well you could click paste and then reformat the cell or you could click paste special and have excel do the formatting automatically. To get to paste special you have to right click on the cell, it’s not one of the buttons at the top of the page.