An Excel workbook certainly isn’t Fort Knox, and the information you store there isn’t too secure. If someone opens your Excel workbook, and is determined to see everything in there, they’ll probably be able to.
However, if your goal is simply to make a workbook easier for people to use, you can hide some of [...]

You know how to sort an Excel list alphabetically, and with Excel 2007 you can even sort an Excel list by colour. Did you know that you can also create a custom list in Excel and use that to sort your data, instead of sorting in alphabetical or numerical order?
Instead of sorting the products in [...]

In the old days, the Sort dialog box in Excel only had 3 levels. However, with a bit of planning, you could sort Excel data by 4 columns or more, and once you learned that trick, life was good. Or at least it was sort of good.

In Excel 2007, the Sort dialog box [...]

You might not love the Ribbon in Excel 2007, but the user interface does have new features that are an improvement over Excel 2003. The new features are useful when you’re working with large formulas or long names.
Change the Formula Bar Height
In Excel 2003, if you click on a cell that contains a long formula, [...]

Yesterday, Seth Godin suggested that we should invent a holiday to celebrate the things that we love. For example, today is Family Day here in Ontario, Canada, a holiday that has only existed for a couple of years. It’s nice to have the day off, and that gave me the chance to think about other [...]

Are you an Excel power user? Answer a few quick questions at the Excelerators Quiz site, and find out how you rate. You could even win a nice prize here at the Contextures blog!
The team at PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 created the Excelerators Quiz, and to make the challenge more exciting, they’re sponsoring a [...]

What will you do better in Excel next year? Do you have any Excel bad habits that you’ll break? Are there any Excel skill areas that you’ll improve?
Based on the questions that I see in the Excel newsgroups and forums, lots of people could resolve to do one or more of these things:

Save your [...]

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and with any luck, you’re taking this entire week off. You might still be full of turkey and eggnog, so I’ll just give you a small Excel tip today – something that’s easy to digest.
Create Quick Excel Grand Totals
Instead of entering each SUM function individually, you can use [...]

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 [...]

Should you spend extravagantly this Christmas, or go cheap, or spend somewhere in the middle?
In Excel, you can use Scenarios to store several versions of a budget, and compare the results. Let’s set up a worksheet where we can compare three scenarios for holiday spending.
Set Up the Worksheet
The first step is to set up the [...]