How long is your attention span? It’s a short work week, so let’s start it off with a couple of quick Excel tips. And when I say “Quick,” I mean, “Don’t blink, or you’ll miss them.”
I recorded a few quick Excel tips, and posted them in the Excel Quick Tips playlist on my Contextures YouTube [...]

Last week I was testing a client’s workbook, and had filled in all the data entry cells, to make sure everything was working correctly.
Before sending the workbook back to my client, I wanted to clear all the data entry cells. Instead of selecting each cell individually, and clearing it, it would be easier to clear [...]

While trying to type a hyphen in Excel 2007, I stumbled onto a handy keyboard shortcut.
I had a bit of an overreach on the hyphen, and hit the F10 key instead. To my amazement, the Ribbon filled with little tags.

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I don’t remember seeing those before.
There’s [...]

A couple of weeks ago I described how you could select a cell in a table, and automatically filter the list based on that cell’s value. The same feature is available in Excel 2007, using a different technique.
Using the same example as in the previous post, the East region is selected in the table below. [...]

When you’re troubleshooting an Excel worksheet, it may help to see the formulas temporarily, instead of the results. With the formulas visible, you can quickly check that the cell references are correct and the formulas are consistent.

Tip: The keyboard shortcut to show or hide the formulas is Ctrl + ` (accent grave, may be above [...]

Recently, while working on a small worksheet in Excel 2007, I tried to insert a new row. Up popped an annoying error message, “Cannot shift objects off sheet.” I couldn’t insert a new row, and had to drag things around, to get the new data inserted.

Change the Object Properties
In older versions of Excel, this [...]

If you’re working on a big worksheet, you might want to see as many rows as possible. The Excel 2007 Ribbon uses about an inch of space at the top of the worksheet, and if you’re just entering or editing data, you probably don’t need to use the Ribbon commands.
You can temporarily minimize the Ribbon, [...]

While working at a client’s office, I sometimes create an Excel workbook that a user will enter data in every day. To make it easy to open the workbook, I add a shortcut to the user’s desktop (with their permission, of course). This makes it easy for the user to open the file, without trying [...]

Do you ever accidentally close a tab in Firefox, then want to get back to a website that you were exploring in that tab?
It happens to me a couple of times every day – I click on a link, and when I’m finished reading that page, I close the tab. Oops! That link hadn’t [...]

I started on a Mac, where the mouse had one big button. Later, I moved to a PC, with a two button mouse. For the past few years I’ve used a mouse with two buttons and a scroll wheel.
At first, I completely ignored the scroll wheel, and found it faster to drag the scroll [...]