Tips and Tricks for Excel

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    Basic Tipsand Tricks

    for Excel

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    Basics

    Definitions

    Cell one of the individual boxes that make up a worksheet and into whichdata is entered (see right).

    Worksheet by default, each workbook is made up of 3 worksheets whichcan be selected in turn by clicking on one of the tabs at the bottom

    left of the worksheet. As default, these are named Sheet 1, 2 & 3

    Highlight to select a cell or series of cells for common manipulation.Highlighted cells are indicated by having a thick black border (see right)Range a selection of touching cells in a straightline (see right)Drag click, hold and move the mouse from source to target cellsColumn a complete vertical range of cells spanning the entire height of aworksheet whether or not the cells contain data/text or not (see right)Row a horizontal range of cells spanning the entire width of a worksheetwhether or not the cells contain data/text or not (see below right)

    Basic Functions

    To enter data or text into a cell, left click within in, type the relevantinformation and hit Enter on your keyboard

    Hit the Enter button, or use the down arrow on your keyboard to movedown one or more cells. Hit Shift + Enter or the up arrow to do the reverse.

    To highlight a cell for manipulation, left click on it. To highlight all cells in aworksheet, left click on the blank box, to the left of A and above 1 at the toplefthand corner of a worksheet (see right). To highlight a range of cells, left clickon the first cell and drag until the last one.Click the Tab button to move one cell or more to the right hold down Shiftand Tab to move to the left

    To copy the contents of a cell or range to a new location, right click onthe cell or range, select Copy (the flashing, dotted border will appear to

    confirm that cells have correctly been selected for copying), right click on thedestination cell and click Paste. To deselect cells for copying or to change yourmind once youve selected a cell or range to copy, press Esc on your keyboardand the flashing border will disappear. To copy cell contents to adjacent cells(those to the left, right, above or below the cell), left click on the small black boxin the bottom right hand corner of a highlighted cell, and drag to the range ofcells that you want the contents of the cell to be pasted into.

    To jump to the first or last cell in a range , left click anywhere within therange and hold down Ctrl + the arrow key that points in the direction of the

    first or last cell in the rangeTo lock a worksheet so that particular columns or rows are always visible

    even if you scroll so far to the right or down that the columns or rows shouldhave disappeared off the screen, left click on the column/row heading or cell tothe right or below the cell where you want the locking to start, left click onWindow at the top of the screen and select Freeze Panes. To unlock this, selectUnfreeze Panes from the Window menu.

    To switch between worksheets, either click on the relevant worksheetname at the bottom left of the workbook or select Ctrl + Page Up to more

    one worksheet to the right or Ctrl + Page Down to more one worksheet to theleft

    To switch between open workbooks, select Ctrl + Tab

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    IFChecks whether a criteria is met - returns TRUE if it is & FALSe if itisn't

    LEN The number of characters in a number, word or sentence

    MAX Finds the biggest number

    MIN Finds the smallest number

    NETWORKDAYS The number of complete workdays between 2 dates

    NOW The current date and timeSUM Adds together all cell values

    SUMIF Adds together the number of cells matching a defined criteria

    TODAY Inserts today's date

    VLOOKUPLooks for a value in the leftmost column of a table and then returnsa value in the same row from a column you specify

    Data Validation

    To allow users of a worksheet to select entries for a cell from adrop-down list, highlight a cell and go to Data Validation. From the

    drop-down menu that appears under Allow, select List. In the box below

    Source, type in the entries that you want to appear in the drop-down list,separated by a comma e.g. yes, no, maybe. Click OK. The highlighted cell willnow have a small downwards arrow to the right of it and by clicking on you canselect either ye, no or maybe. Trying to manually write any text into the cellother than these 3 entries, will cause excel to bring up the following error message.

    If you only want to suggest entries in a cell rather than preventing them from typingin anything other than a specified list of entries, following the same exercise as abovebut before clicking OK, click on the Error Alert tab and in the drop down menubelow Style, click on Information. You can then either user the standard Warningmessage or create your own in the free text box below Error Message. When usersthan enter text into your cell other than those in the pre-defined list, the followingwarning message will be displayed, though users can still enter the text they want byignoring this message and clicking on Yes.

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    Conditional Formatting

    To enable Excel to apply formatting to a cell when the text within itmeets certain criteria or condition, highlight a cell and go to Format

    Conditional Formatting (there are many different criteria that you couldcome up with for text within a cell to meet, but lets use the example of

    formatting text within a cell when it is a negative number). From the seconddrop-down menu along select less than and then type in 0 from the next drop-downmenu along to the right. Then click on Format and select how you want the formattedtext to appear (e.g select Bold and then Color as Red). Select Ok. If you now type anegative number into the highlight cell, it will appear in bold, red text and in normalcolour if you enter a positive number. Using the format painter button (see right) youcan then paste this conditional formatting into any cells you want and negative textin those cells with turn bold and red.

    Repeating Column Headings on Each Printout Page

    If, when you print out a worksheet, your columns are too long to fit on oneprintout page and so you lose the column headings on subsequent pages of the

    printout, go to File Page Setup Sheet Print Titles. In the Rows to Repeat atTop box, highlight the column headings you want printed on each printed page byclicking on the cell select button (see right). Then print.

    Comparing 2 lists

    Have you ever had two lists to compare using Excel? In this example we will assumethat you have a MASTER LIST of cities (column A). Then you will have a second list ofcities (column C) to compare to the MASTER LIST. We want to know which items inthe second list are NEW cities and which ones already exist in the MASTER LIST. Wewill do this using formulas in column D where the results will displayed.

    This is accomplished by using a combination of the VLOOKUP and ISNA worksheetfunctions. We have entered the following formula incell D2:

    =ISNA(VLOOKUP(C2,A:A,1,FALSE))

    Next, we copied this formula down through the last row in the column adjacent to thelist of possible NEW items. Let's break thisdown to see what this is doing.

    VLOOKUP(C2,A:A,1,FALSE)

    First, we're using the VLOOKUP function to try to find each individual item from thesecond list (column C) anywhere within the MASTER LIST. In other words, this part ofthe formula says look at the list in column A and determine if there's a match on theentry in cell C2.

    If a city was not found in the MASTER list, then the VLOOKUP returns a #N/A error.That's okay though, because the next part of our formula looks at whether or not wegot this error. To do this, we have nested the VLOOKUP in an ISNA function:

    ISNA(VLOOKUP(C2,A:A,1,FALSE))

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    The ISNA function will return either a TRUE or FALSE. This part of the formula says ifthe VLOOKUP function returns a #N/A error then it's TRUE, otherwise it tested FALSEfor the #N/A error.

    So, whenever the formula returns a TRUE, it means that item from the second list isNEW - it does not exist already in the MASTER LIST. Likewise, if the result in column D

    is a FALSE, it means this item was already included in your MASTER LIST.

    Source: http://www.beyondtechnology.com/tips009.shtml

    Or:

    You can compare lists using conditional formatting and entering the formula=COUNTIF(Column1, A1)=1 under Formula Is. Column1 is the column of cells youare trying to match to column A. A1 is the cell in Column A in which the conditionalformat should be applied.

    Make sure the $ signs dont appear before A1 otherwise the formula wontwork properly.

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