Friday, September 27, 2013

The Ins And Outs Of Excel

By Hedrick Lepsch


If you are currently using Microsoft Office, you should feel lucky. Many people throughout the world do not have access to Microsoft Office.

This post is designed as a little Microsoft training in Kuwait to help you master the use of this east-to-use program. Take a look at the tips below.

First up is the "F4" button. In Excel, F4 is a function to repeat the last action you took in a different cell. For example, say you're working your way through a financial statement and want to mark any instances of when you went over budget in red. Where you would normally have to move your mouse up to the coloring tool at the top of the page, you can simply press F4 instead.

You can even install certain clipboard extender apps that will allow you to store even more items under your clipboard. These apps have been highly reviewed by Microsoft Office users everywhere.

If you select a cell and press the "=" sign and the first letter of a function you're looking for, you will be given a drop down menu to select a function. For the time being, type in "sum" until the word appears highlighted in the box.

Instead of having to go through the menu system, you can hit F7 in most versions of Word and Excel and pull up the checker instantaneously. It makes for a quick, standard shortcut to get what you know you want quickly.

People can sometimes waste a lot of money on a machine that they are not using to its full capacity. This is truly a shame, because there are people in the world who would love to have a nice machine like that, but they cannot afford it.

Second, Excel has a number of useful tools built into the program to make inputting data quicker. The one that sticks out most is making a long list of dates.

Add "shift" to the mix and go back to the previous field. Use "control" and F11 to lock the field and Shift + Ctrl + F11 to unlock it again. Fourth is Ctrl + F. This function will bring up the find/find and replace window in both programs.

All you have to do is enter Backstage View, select Recent, and then add a checkbox next to "Quickly access this number of recent documents." You then will enter in the number of recent documents you would like to be able to access.

When you see that cross, click the mouse and drag it down. You'll see that Excel auto-fills the dates of all the cells with days of the year. It'll even include February 29 for leap years. You can also use this tool to populate the same number over and over again.

These five shortcuts can make all the difference in improving your efficiency and happiness using these two programs. This is just a small piece of the much larger puzzle though.

These Microsoft courses in Kuwait will help you to learn keystrokes and shortcuts that will help you save time and work and help prevent you from getting carpal tunnel syndrome by using your computer mouse so much.




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