Want to get your geek on while cheering on Australia in the 2011 Rugby World Cup? Microsoft’s Excel Blog highlights a free Excel tracker template which you can use to highlight games for any country and track scores as the tournament progresses. [Excel Blog]
Most Excel users will know about the Fill command, which can be used to rapidly copy data and formulas into a group of cells. But there’s also a related option that can make it easy to add selected data: end mode.
Excel has handy keyboard shortcuts for everything from bulleted lists to text wrapping. The official Excel blog offers up PDF cheat sheets for the most common shortcuts, sorted into Control-triggered shortcuts, function keys and other oddities.
One of the most common problems with some Excel workbooks (and other types of spreadsheets) is painfully slow load times and updates. There are three typical cuprits: too many calculations, too much formatting, and unnecessary file overhead. Here’s how to fix them.
Excel has long had a feature allowing you to add background shading to cells, but if you use non-standard colours then replicating them can be fiddly. Excel 2010 makes that process easier with a simple but obvious tweak: a list of recently-used colours on the Fill drop-down (the small bucket) in the Ribbon.
Excel is a whizz at totalling numbers, but if too much copy-and-pasting and editing has turned some numbers in your spreadsheet into text format, then the results are often way out of whack. It’s almost impossible to fix that kind of problem without some manual intervention, but the TRIM and CLEAN functions can make the task simpler.
Google Docs Viewer can already handle PDF and Word files, and now it can render spreadsheets stored online for you as well.
If you’re a spreadsheet jockey, but you’re not keen on Excel’s default settings, reader Curare details how to set up a custom Excel template so the data-wrangling app always uses the workspace you prefer.
