Microsoft Excel: Some Helpful Tips

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.

Sometimes when you have a spreadsheet filled with data, you need to move an entire row into another space. To select the entire row quickly, simply click in the row and then hit shift and the spacebar. This will highlight the row, and then you can cut the row entirely or paste it elsewhere on that spreadsheet or another spreadsheet.

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.

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.

Fortunately, you can address the problem quickly. First look at the top right area of your spreadsheet, over by where the scroll bar is located. Above that you will notice two arrows, one is thin and points down and the other is full and points up. However your cursor between these two arrows on the little box in between. Your cursor will transform from a plus sign or arrow into an up and down arrows with two lines in the middle of them. Click and then gently drag down until you see a duplicate header appear and then stop dragging. The very top header will remain visible no matter how far down you scroll on your main spreadsheet page.

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.




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