Microsoft Excel: Some Helpful Tips

By Frankline Bell


Microsoft Excel is one of those programs that is far more versatile than many people believe. Certainly it allows you to enter and analyze data, but you also can use it for accounting, planning, tracking data, making calendars, creating a budget and much more. While many people know how to use the most basic features of Excel, here are a few cool tricks that you might not have known.

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.

For those times when you need to highlight a whole column, just click in the first cell and then find the F8 key at the top of your keyboard. Then click that F8 and then click last cell in your column. You also can use this process to highlight every cell in a spreadsheet. Just click in that very first cell and then in the very last cell and everything will highlight. To end this function, just tap on that F8 again and the function will stop. You also can use this to just highlight a chunk of data within your spreadsheet.

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.

To make sure the header appears all the time, you need to look at the right edge of the spreadsheet. There is a small down arrow, then a little box with a dash in it, and then a filled-in up arrow. If you hover over the little box, your cursor will change to an up and down arrow with two horizontal lines. Click and hold and move the bar that appears down until it appears below the header row. This will appear as if you have two headers, but notice as you scroll down that the top header remains.

If you need to organize data a certain way, you can use the handy sort function. At the top of the page, you will notice a variety of tabs - Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc. Under Home, you will find Sort & Filter. You can create your own custom sorts or just go with alphabetical sorts. You can also filter columns to show just certain data which can be very helpful. This is just the tip of the iceberg as there are literally hundreds of shortcuts and functions available in Excel. For more help and hints, click on the question mark at the top of the Excel page. It is surrounded by a blue arrow and links to the Microsoft Excel help system.




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