18 Tips to Make you an Excel Formatting Pro
We can take any Excel workbook and format it until Christmas, and we would still not be done. But not many of us have so much of time or energy. So, today, lets talk formatting.
In this, you will learn how to
1) Use tables to format data quickly
2) Change colors of your worksheet in a snap
3) Use cell styles
4) Quickly clone formatting using format painter
5) Clear formats to begin with a clean-slate
6) Formatting shortcuts
7) Formatting options for print
and 8 ) Why you should not go overboard formatting and 10 other tips.
So go ahead and become a formatting pro.
Excel Tables Tutorial & 13 Tips for making you a Data Guru
Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.
What is an excel table?
Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”
Get rid of that ugly formatting with two simple tricks
We are on a tiki tour around NZ. So far we have been to Taupo & Rotorua. And we are doing what you do when you are on a holiday – being lazy, going on walks, swimming in lakes, eating copious amounts of food and getting lost. Of course, all this means, I have very little time to access to internet & my blog. So the updates will be slow for next two weeks. Here is a quick tip (well, two of them) to keep you busy and awesome.
How to remove ugly formatting from your workbooks?
Do you have a colleague or boss (shudder) that loves to apply their special touches to every workbook their mouse lands on? Do you constantly wince and whine when you have to work on that spreadsheet.
Here are two handy ways to restore your data to its original glory.
Clear formats:
Simple, select the data you want formatting gone from, go to Home > Clear > Formats.
And Excel will weave an expelliformat spell at your data and make it clean.
Here is a quick demo.
Work with charts faster using selection pane & select object tools [quick video tip]
Working with multiple charts (or drawing shapes / images) can be a very slow process. But here is a secret to boost your productivity.
Use selection pane & select object tools
Selection Pane & Select Objects?
If you have never heard of these, don’t worry. These are 2 very powerful features hidden in Excel. Once you know how to unlock them, you will never look back.
How to use selection pane & select object tools to work with charts faster – Video
In this video, understand how to use these powerful features to work with charts faster.
Format faster with paste special & double click [video]
Making your workbooks, charts, dashboards & presentations beautiful is a time consuming process. It is a mix of art & craft. Naturally, we spend hours polishing that important slideshow or visualization. But do you know about simple features in Excel that can save you a lot of time and help you create gorgeous output?
How to insert a blank column in pivot table?
We all know pivot table functionality is a powerful & useful feature. But it comes with some quirks. For example, we cant insert a blank row or column inside pivot tables.
So today let me share a few ideas on how you can insert a blank column.
But first let’s try inserting a column
Imagine you are looking at a pivot table like above.
And you want to insert a column or row. Go ahead and try it.
Formatting shortcuts for keyboard junkies
A lot of analysts swear strong allegiance to keyboard shortcuts. But when it comes to formatting a spreadsheet, these shortcuts go for a toss as formatting is a mouse-heavy activity.
But we can use a few simple & effective shortcuts to zip through various day to day formatting tasks. Let me share my favorite formatting shortcuts.