Excel at Excel

In Excel, you would have noticed that the cell entries either get chopped off if the cell width exceeds the set limit. Or if you try and set the cell width to suit the length of the character string the adjacent cells get pushed off. You could get around this with Alt+Enter which starts a new line in the same line without sacrificing either way. This just adjusts the cell height to add new lines instead of crashing into the next cells.

Excel has a function similar to Word, to insert date and time. CTRL+; (semicolon) gives you the date while CTRL+: (colon, which is shift + semi-colon) gives the time. If that saved on keystrokes, try this. CTRL+SHIFT+" helps you to copy the value from the cell above the active cell.

If you have an entire row or column of numbers and need to add them up in one cell, the autosum function is quite useful. You go to the end (right or bottom) of a group of numbers (even if it contains non-numerals in cells in between) and press ALT+=, use the arrow keys to move up/ left and select the cells.

Any time it always makes sense to add a few lines as a comment to some entries that need to be highlighted. Do that with SHIFT+F2, which is the equivalent of the red ink marking that you do in the margins with normal paper documents.

A hyperlink is always a good way of tying up related documents, irrespective of the type. For example, You can link your PowerPoint presentation file to the original data file in excel and the written documentation in MS Word by using CTRL+K.

To format a cell or group of them you can use CTRL+1 which will give you the format menu. If they happen to be numbers which you want formatted as general number, you can use CTRL+SHIFT+~(tilde). If they are to be formatted as currency then CTRL+SHIFT+$ does the trick. (This menu has a list of currency you can format it as, but then our currency is hidden away as INR, without the sign we usually use). They appear with a standard two decimal format with negative numbers parenthesised. The top line of the keyboard with CTRL and SHIFT does a lot of useful functions such as:

You could make more than one selection in excel. Make the first selection the normal way. For the second part you need to get back to the mouse after all. Press CTRL and use the left button on the mouse for the second selection. With these two selections you can move to the right using CTRL+ALT+ right arrow and the left arrow key to move left, between these two non-adjacent selections. If you have blocks of data with atleast a blank row or column separating them, your selection of each block is made easy. Just go to any cell in the middle of that block and press CTRL+SHIFT + *. It selects adjoining cells up, down, left and right till it comes to a blank row/ column/cell.

We come to the important things, last as usual. You guessed it, CTRL+Z to undo (I could be saying this in my sleep too, nowadays) and CTRL+ - to delete a selection.