We have approached our final installment of easy excel tips and shortcuts!
This was designed to highlight tools in Microsoft Excel that help you to save time and be even more productive.
What we’ve covered so far…
Part I
1. Use a template
2. COUNT and SUM functions
3. Keyboard Shortcuts
4. Auto-Fill
5. Inserting rows or columns
6. Filter your data
7. Freeze a row or column
8. Define a print area
9. Protect with a password
10. Create multiple worksheets
11. Visualize your data
12. Select your entire worksheet with one click
13. Edit cell borders
14. Transpose data from rows to columns (or vice versa)
15. Combine contents of multiple cells into one cell
16. Split Cell’s Contents Into Multiple Cells
Since we offered trick #15 we thought we might follow up with the reverse action. Here’s how you take a cell with multiple characters and split those into separate cells:
Select the cell or range of cells you want to do this for. Then, go to the “Data” menu tab and click into “Data tools”. There is a function called “Text to Columns” – select that. It will offer some options for how you want to split things up, and then execute!
17. Customize Your Shortcuts Menu
There are already a whole host of shortcuts by way of the main menu tabs at the top of your Excel window, but you do have the ability to take this a step further and create shortcuts for other things you find yourself doing regularly that you wish you had a button to press for any one of those to happen!
To the right of your undo/redo arrows on the top left of your Excel window you will see a little line on top of an arrow pointing down. When you hover over this little icon you’ll see that it gives you the ability to “Customize Quick Access Toolbar”.
Click on it. Once you get there, you can choose the tools you want shortcut buttons for. You will see these up at the top where that little line-and-arrow icon appears, to the right of undo/redo arrows.
18. Autocorrect
We know that this exists in Word and wherever else we’re doing some writing, but did you know that this exists in Excel? Cleaning up your worksheet to standardize spellings can help you to better organize and, consequently, analyze the data.
Go to File (first menu tab at the top of Excel window). Choose “Options” to open the full Options pop-up window. Go to “Proofing” and select “Autocorrect” in order to set up all your options for auto-correcting your document as you wish!
19. MicroCharts (What Are Those?!)
These aren’t the jumbo-sized data visualizations we spoke about earlier in this series. Here we’re talking about one-cell-sized representations of a range of data, just to give the reader an idea of the data trends.
Just choose the data you want to represent in your microchart, go to “Insert”, and go to the “Sparklines” section to choose the look of your little mini chart.
20. Apply Formatting Across Multiple Worksheets
So, you want to make your other worksheets, or at least some of them, look and work just like one of your other pages. Hold down Ctrl key and click on all of the tabs of sheets you want formatted identically. Once you do that, any formatting you apply in one worksheet will translate to the others. Remember to de-select sheets when you want to do things that should not happen on other sheets!
We hope these easy Excel tips help you to save time and make your data work for you in Excel!
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