Learning new Microsoft Office tricks in "just a minute"
OK… I haven’t lost my mind here… It is very possible that if you have a large spreadsheet that has very little data in it, you might have a large number of blank rows in one of your worksheets. Each of those “blank” cells in the “blank” rows takes up space, and it can add up rather quickly when it comes to the overall size of your spreadsheet… let me show you how to fix that.
Today’s tip comes courtesy of Francis Hayes – The Excel Addict, where he explains how to simulate a “paper tape” function in Excel. For you young’uns who are confused by this concept… in the olden days, people used to add numbers on an adding machine, which often produced a paper tape as the numbers were entered. You would get a total, plus a visual list of numbers that got you to that total. You could then confirm that you entered everything correctly. Some habits die hard however, and here’s how you can do the same type of “paper tape” function in Excel.
This is one of those tips you may not know about, but it will be a lifesaver if you only have to use it once. Using the Fill > Justify feature in Excel, you can concatenate data from multiple Excel cells into a single cell. It’s easy, and here’s how it works…
This is a cool feature that I was unaware of… you can use F4 to repeat a formatting function in Excel. I tried out the F4 repeat on a couple of cell formats, and it works pretty well. Here’s how…
Having done this tip gig for a number of years now, I don’t often find a tip that blows my mind. It’s even more rare that I find a tip that blows my mind, *and* has apparently been there for years. Today’s tip fits that bill… you can have up to 24 selectable Office Clipboard entries to choose from when you’re working in Outlook, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Even better is that they are shared across all those programs! Here’s how it works…
Here’s a feature in Excel that I never noticed before… like *that’s* a surprise! 🙂 If you need to add a screenshot in an Excel spreadsheet (perhaps for documentation), you can use the Screenshot feature that’s built into Excel… and you can manipulate the image once it’s out there! Here’s how you do that…
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Excel. I know it’s very powerful, but I really don’t know how to use it beyond the very basics. Today was one of those instances where I had a column of “numbers” in a spreadsheet that I wanted to sort, but Excel thought they were text strings. I wasn’t sure how to get Excel to truly treat them as numbers until I found this cool trick…
Using the keyboard arrow keys in conjunction with the Control (CTRL) key moves you to the top, bottom, front, and back of the column and rows that you’re in. But of course, I always forget that, so I’m putting this tip out there to remind me…
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get a question from someone along the lines of “does do , and why doesn’t it?”. Or, there’s the “when will Microsoft change to allow us to do ” question. Bottom line… we don’t know, and we have virtually no sway to influence Microsoft to change their software… but you do!
