Superb Spreadsheets: 5 Excel Tips and Tricks for Office Workers

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Microsoft Excel has been used by over 750 million people. But many of those people probably aren’t using Excel to its full potential.

Let’s go through the top Excel tips and tricks to take your spreadsheets to the next level.

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1. Autofill

Autofill is one of the most useful Excel tips that gets overlooked. If you start typing a series of numbers, you can go to the last cell, click the plus sign, and select all the cells that need to be filled.

Excel will automatically generate the rest of the numbers in the sequence. This is particularly useful when you’re listing a series of dates! You can also check the Fill Series option for more ways you can use autofill.

2. Hide Things

If there’s some aspect of a sheet you want to keep hidden, it’s easy-peasy. You can hide a row or column by clicking on the header and selecting Hide.

If you want to hide individual cells, highlight the desired cells and select Format Cells. You can also hide different sheets if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just right-click on the tab and it’ll give you the option.

3. Use Other Software

You can use other software with Excel or with Excel data to transform how you use the program. You can create an Excel library C# with the right program.

There are apps to help make your time using Excel more productive too. These apps can help you get rid of duplicate files, or create new shortcuts to make your experience using Excel even easier.

If you’re interested in how to optimize Microsoft Excel so that it looks its best, there are ways you can do that too. There are add-ins so you can use maps within Microsoft Excel, or different colors for more flexibility.

4. Color Code With Conditional Formatting

If you like to stay organized, conditional formatting will be a good friend to you. You can create rules to keep your entire table properly color-coded. You can also create rules for borders or for shading.

You can create rules for certain dates, or for specific values. All you need to do is to click through to the highlighted rules sub-menu, and you’ll have all of the tools that you need.

5. Use Shortcuts

Like with most Microsoft applications, Excel has plenty of keyboard shortcuts for you to take advantage of. To get between sheets quickly, you can hold the Control key and Page Up or Page Down. To add the current time to your sheet, hold the Control key and the Shift key.

Those are just two examples. There are lots of other shortcuts for Excel you can use; you can click Help on the navigation bar when you’re using the program!