Excel Tips and Tricks – An Intro
This article on Excel tips and tricks aims to offer you as much information as possible. These MS Excel tips and tricks may seldom appear anywhere else as Bright Hub has carefully compiled several articles that help you make the most of your favorite spreadsheet program.
MS Excel needs no introduction. Ever since the history of MS Excel, people use the spreadsheet to enter, manipulate and analyze data – as such or by way of charts. No matter whether you are a beginner, intermediate or an expert user, you will find something useful here. Did you know that MS Excel was first developed for the Mac Operating system? Strange, but true! It later became an indispensible part of the Microsoft desktop-based Office Automation Software, the MS Office Suite. Office 2010, the latest version as of now, also offers a cloud based version so that people can edit their documents from anywhere in the world.
Let us now focus on some Excel tips and tricks that might help you enhance your experience on the spreadsheet application.
Working with Lists in Excel
Lists are related data arranged in one or more rows. You can create lists using the Create List command under Data tab. These lists can be arranged into drop down lists, which are especially helpful when you are using the Excel sheet for data entry. You can create custom drop down lists in Excel using the Data Validation tool.
You might also wish to create dependent lists. These lists are populated based on the selection in the first list. For example, the first list comprises of country names. Once the user selects the country name, the second list is populated with the names of states in that country. These lists are dependent on another list. Creating dependent lists is easy in MS Excel against creating lists using programming languages.
Sometimes, users of your Excel forms might enter a wrong answer. In such case, it helps if you can display a custom message that tells how to select or enter a value. Excel allows you to create custom input messages and even error alerts.
Formatting Tips and Tricks for MS Excel
Excel provides just a small dialog box for formatting. However, you can do wonders when you know how to use it properly. Be it a normal report, a form, or charts, you have plenty of options to format the spreadsheet – data, charts, and other elements such as images, sound etc.
Charts are an important element when you are performing an analysis of data. You can create charts with one click in Excel. You can add a chart to the current worksheet or you can add it as a separate page in the workbook. It is easier to create chart sheets first and then change the chart sheet to embedded chart. This helps in better formatting of the spreadsheets.
For those who are new to Excel charts, we have an exclusive article. Please read “Tips and Tricks for Creating Charts and Graphs in Microsoft Excel” by Michelle McDonough to get started with charts in MS Excel.
Plenty of other articles exist on Bright Hub to help you with formatting. Here are some of them:
Customize Anything on a Chart with Right-click
Display Profitability in a Profit Waterfall Chart
Copy Formatting to a New Range
Copy Cell Formatting, Including Column Widths
Use White Color for Fonts to Hide Data
Add a Printable Background to Your Spreadsheet
Change the Background of the Worksheet
Change Width of All Columns in One Command
Use the Border Tab in the Format Cells Dialog
Add a Page Break at Each Change in Customer
Draw an Arrow to Visually Illustrate That Two Cells Are Connected
Add an AutoShape to Your Worksheet
Draw More Than the Four Basic Shapes
Add a 3-D Effect to an AutoShape
These are just some of the articles related to formatting in Excel. You can search for more Excel tips and tricks on formatting using the search feature on top of each page at Bright Hub.
Please turn to next page for a list of more than 277 Excel tips and tricks.
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