Five tips for Microsoft Excel 2010 for intermediate users

Remember the first time you opened Microsoft Excel 2010 application? You slowly started using it and familiarized yourself to the application. And slowly you have become someone who we call an intermediate user. You are not a beginner anymore. You are someone who knows his way in the application.

Different view, same document

Let’s consider this situation: you are working on a document that has considerable amount of data. You have to scroll from one part of the document to another when you are working on those parts of the document. Doesn’t it irritate you when you have to manually scroll every time you need to navigate to the other part of the document? We have a small tip for you. You can split the document and simultaneously look and work on two different parts of a document without even scrolling. In the view menu, there’s an option to split the screen which will help you split the screen and lets you work on two different parts of the documents and one shot.

Where's your Status Bar?

Where is the status bar? This is something that most of the users skip to notice. Status Bar is the small bar that’s present at the end of the window. The bar which displays information on the number pages in the document, number of words in the document, etc. if you are using Microsoft Word 2010 is known as the status bar. In Excel, it displays relevant information if you select a group of cells, like sum of the numbers in that cell, the average of the cells, etc. You can customize this bar by right clicking on it and choosing which options you need to be displayed and which ones to be hidden.

Paste special and it's uses

When you are copying values that are derived by formulae in Microsoft Excel 2010, you might encounter an error because Excel copies the formulae along with the data that’s present in the cells. So if you have to copy-paste just the values in a cell, what would you do? Paste special is the answer for you. After you paste the values from the copied cells, have you ever noticed a small pop-up? If you click the down arrow on the pop-up it expands into a menu and you would find the options for paste special hidden there. If you select ‘values’, it will only copy the values from the cells and paste only the values at the destination cells. As simple as that!

Create your own custom lists

You would know that you can use the existing set of lists that you can use in Microsoft Excel. For people who don’t know what lists are, these are the lists that we generally use with fill handles. List with the names of months, list with names of the weekdays, etc. are already in place in Microsoft Excel 2010 for you to utilize. But if you have a custom list in mind, here’s how you can create it. Go to File, click ‘Options’, and then click ‘Advanced’. Once you reach the advanced settings page, go to the bottom of that page by scrolling down. Under the heading ‘General’ click ‘Edit custom lists’. This will open a new window where you can create a custom list!

Data validation is the best tool!

This has to be one of the best features you might get to know about Microsoft Excel 2010. Data validation is a feature or a tool that will restricts other users of the worksheet when incorrect data is being entered into a cell. Let’s consider this: if you need a few people to add their response for something. You can restrict the input values to say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘May be’ and if any other value that’s entered in the cell will not be accepted. Isn’t that cool? You can find the ‘Data Validation’ under the tab ‘Data’. A small window would appear on the screen where you have to give the values that you want to be restricted to and your job is done!

Aren’t these great features to use in Microsoft Excel? You should start using those more often to get used to them and take a step further and become an expert-intermediate user.