If you’re like most people who use computers, you make use of Excel on a daily basis, whether you’re figuring out your household expenses and income or figuring out what each of your company’s sales representatives sold for the month. But, if you’re really like the majority of Excel users, the possibilities are also good that you are not making use of this program to its full capacity. Excel can be a truly powerful software. You only need to learn how to tap into its full power. Here, then, are three tricks to help you get more from Excel.
Adding non-contiguous values
Excel’s AutoSum option is an incredibly useful tool. It lets users instantly add rows of numbers together to calculate a single sum. Way too many users, though, don’t know the way you use AutoSum to add values which aren’t contiguous, or adjacent, to one another. Fortunately, this task isn’t as complicated as users might think. The TechRebpublic blog recently highlighted how users are able to use AutoSum to include non-contiguous sums. The procedure involves picking one column of numbers and holding the computer’s “Control” key to select a second column. Users are able to use AutoSum to compute the sums of both columns, even if they’re not located alongside the other.
Preventing bad data entry
Do your employees often enter bad data within your company spreadsheets? Your workers might be entering text in a spreadsheet designed just to accommodate numbers. This is often a frustrating situation when it’s time to analyze your spreadsheet. The good news, though, as PC Magazine wrote in a recent story, is the fact that Excel features a method intended to protect against personnel from typing the wrong information inside a company spreadsheet. This phenomenal feature? It’s known as Data Validation. Click on the “Table Tools” tab on Excel. Next, click “Data Validation.” Excel then will allow you to enter just what type of data your employees need to be entering into the spreadsheet. As an illustration, you could tell Excel just to allow numbers and never text inside a spreadsheet’s fields. Excel will prevent employees from entering an incorrect kind of data.
Don’t let unsaved files ruin your day
We all get that sinking feeling when our computers turn off while we’re working with an Excel file that we never saved. Fortunately, with newer versions of Excel, there’s no cause for that feeling. That’s because Excel makes it simple to easily recover documents which you thought you lost. To recover these important files, click the “File” tab in Excel. Then click “Recover Unsaved Documents.” After this, you simply select the “lost” document once it appears on your screen. This procedure works for Excel files that you never even gave a name.
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