Paste or Ctrl+v is probably the most effective productivity tool available to us. But how well do you know “Paste”?, do you know that there are at least 17 different variations to paste data to your excel sheets? Surprised? Well, read this post to become a master paster

The post is divided in to 2 parts,

• Basic Pasting Tricks
• Pasting while Manipulating Data

Basic Copy Pasting of Data

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1. Paste Values

   If you want to just paste the values from copied cells, just hit ATL+E followed by S and V. Very useful when you want to strip away existing formatting and work with plain data.

2. Paste Formats (or Format painter)

   Like that sleek table format your colleague has made? But don’t have the time to redo it yourself, worry not, you can paste formatting (including any conditional formats) from any copied cells to new cells, just hit ALT+E S T.

3. Paste Formulas

   If you want to copy a bunch of formulas to a new range of cells - this is very useful. Just copy the cells containing the formulas, hit ALT+E S F. You can achieve the same effect by dragging the formula cell to new range if the new range is adjacent.

4. Paste Validations

   Love copy those input validations you have created but not the cell contents or anything, just press ALT+E S N. This is very useful when you created a form and would like to replicate some of the cells to another area.

5. Adjust column widths of some cells based on other cells

   You have created a table for tracking purchases and your boss liked it. So he wanted you to create another table to track sales and you want to maintain the column widths in the new table. You dont have to move back and forth looking for column widths or anything. Instead just paste column widths from your selection. Use ALT+E S W.

6. Grab comments only and paste them elsewhere

   If you want to copy comments alone from certain cells to a new set of cells, just use ALT + E S C. This will reduce the amount of retyping you need to do.

7. Of course you want to paste everything

   Just use CTRL+V or ALT+E+P or one of those little paste icons on the tool bar

Manipulating with copied data while pasting

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8. Add while pasting

   For example, if you have in Row 1 - 1 2 3 as values and in Row 2 - 7 8 9 as values and you would like to add row 1 values to row 2 values to get - 8 10 12, you can do this using paste special. Just copy row 1 values and use ALT + E S D.



9. Subtract while pasting

   Just use ALT + E S S

10. Multiply while pasting

    Just use ALT + E S M

11. Divide while pasting

    Just use ALT + E S I

12. Skip blank cells while pasting

    This is very useful when you are pasting data from that contains lots of blank cells. Instead of using filters or some type of if()s you can simply use ALT+E S B. This will remove all the blank cells from the copied cells before pasting it. Remember you can combine this option with other types of pastes (For eg. you can skip blanks while pasting values alone or skip blanks while adding the copied cells to paste area.)

13. Convert rows to columns or columns to rows while pasting data

    For example you have large list of values in column A and you want to move (or copy) these values to row 1 across. How would you do that? Of course you can rely on trusty paste-special to do that little job for you. Just use ALT + E S E. This will transpose copied values before pasting, thus converting rows to columns and columns to rows.

14. Paste reference to original cells

    If you want to create references to a bulk of cells instead of copy-pasting all the values this is the option for you. Just use ALT+E S L to create an automatic reference to copied range of cells.

15. Paste text by converting it in to columns

    
    This option is very useful when you are pasting data from outside. For example, if you want to paste few lines of this blog post in an excel sheet but would like to see each word in a separate cell, you can copy the content here (CTRL+C), go to your excel sheet and use CTRL+V to paste the data and then click on the paste icon that appears at the bottom of the pasted cell and select “use text import wizard” option. This will launch the mildly powerful text import wizard of excel using which you can convert copied text to columns by defining some simple parsing conditions. The default options split text into words (by using space as a delimiter). You can use this option to convert most types of text including comma separated values, fixed width values. The text import wizard dialog looks somewhat like this.
    

16. Paste live data from web

    If you want to import live data from web to your worksheets, you can use Excel web queries. This is a powerful tool using which you can create worksheets that can fetch data from web (or network resources) and display in your worksheet for you to process them. You can findout more about these by learning to create a mutual fund portfolio tracker sheet.

17. What is your favorite paste trick?

    There are many more paste tricks that are hidden in excel, like pasting live xml data to your sheets, pasting images, objects, files etc. But I am more interesting in knowing your favorite pasting hack. So tell me, what is your all time favorite paste?

Interested to learn more? Show temperature using these thermometer charts, Get stock quotes to your workbook with one click, Master your ifs and buts - learn these 6 tips on if(), Project plan in 60 seconds, your time starts now!, Honey! I shrunk the bar charts and much more

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Often you may want to fill a column only with weekday dates instead of all dates. Here is a simple trick you can use instead of writing nifty if formulas or manually entering the weekday dates.

When you auto fill dates by dragging mouse (or using menu > edit > fill > series > selecting “type: date”), just use weekdays only option as shown below.

Now you dont have to create project plans with weekends in it

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I haven’t noticed this before, but google maps provides 3d building outlines. I think this is pretty cool.
You can see them in action here.

Earlier on google : Google Park bench in Russia

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Just a take a moment away from your job, graduation term project, cooking or cat petting - whatever it is that you are doing. Now think and tell me if you have any other interesting, exciting, simpler, cooler of way of doing the same? Just remove all your assumptions, forget anything you have learned about how to solve it, ignore what your mom/dad/teacher may tell you on how to solve this. Just shut your mind and think of a different way to solve it.

It is surprising what you can find. If you need motivation - find out these 15 different ways in which you can lace your shoes.

Original source for the image: popgive

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we are going…, originally uploaded by Chandoo.

It was a lazy Saturday, my wife was having a concall related to work and I needed to pass sometime. While rummaging through the storage closet I found this old Chinese checkers board along with 60 marbles. Instantly I knew what to shoot.

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Let us learn a simple charting hack to create a thermo-meter chart in excel. This type of charts can be effective in communicating one data point, they can make excellent presentation slide or dashboard widget. What more, they are as simple to do as adding whipped cream to your latte. So lets begin:

1. First we will draw thermometer outline using excel’s drawing tools

This is the simplest part. We will create a thermometer outline by drawing a circle and a rounded rectangle. See the illustration to the right to understand. Next we will fill the circle with our favorite color. Not that excel presents us with may choices, but I choose the light green, the kind that you see on the Starbucks small size cups. Oh btw, learn how to tweak excel chart color limitation to add your own colors.

2. Create a one column bar chart to fit inside thermometer

Now we will create a one column bar to fit snugly inside our thermometer outline (see below illustration). We will start by creating a default bar chart for a single cell containing temperature (or customer experience index or sales actual vs. target % or no. of cats you have), Next we will remove grid lines, plot area backgrounds, x-axis, column borders, now it should look like just a bar. Then we will adjust gap width to 0 (select the bar, right click and goto format data series, click on the options tab and adjust gap width to 0), this will make sure that our one column occupies the entire plot area.

Then we will adjust the scale of y-axis so that whenever the temperature (or the number of cats) changes our bar height changes (instead of excel default behavior of adjusting plot area and thus often retaining the bar heights). Now we will remove the y-axis as well. Finally, change the bar color to light yellow, remove chart area fill color, border. That is all, we now have a shiny little bar that changes its height when you change the cell containing temperature.

3. Finally fit the chart inside the thermometer outline

This is simple drag and drop game where in we will drag our chart and drop it inside our thermometer outline created in step1. And we are done. Go ahead, celebrate, show it off, print shiny little thermometers on a paper and hang it in your cubicle.

If you have difficulty creating or understanding this trick download thermometer chart templates I have created and play with it.

Like this? Also learn how to create artistic grid charts as an alternative to pie charts, beautify your charts with these 73 designer quality templates, put together in-cell pie charts, bar charts and much more.

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While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything.

First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, this will open “Research task pane” on the right side of the screen. The screen should look something like this:

Dont worry if you dont see the stock quote, that could be because your research type is set to either “all research books” or “thesaurus”, just click the drop-down and select “MSN Money Stock Quotes” - 2nd option from last (Excel remembers your selection, so next time you alt+click on a company code it automatically shows the stock quote) Once the quote is displayed in the research task pane, just click the “insert price” button to get the quote inserted in to your worksheet. Simple eh?

Now, if you want to track a bunch of company quotes, just create a simple macro to do the alt+click on each of the company code cells and you have a real time quote tracking terminal built into your excel sheet. Just go wild

Bonus tip: If you want a company profile data for a particular stock (like company address, phone number, exchange codes, last year revenue) select the “Thomas Gale company profiles” instead.

Please note that both this options work Excel 2003 and above.

Also read: Create stock / mutual fund portfolio tracker in excel using web lookup queries

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