Copy Paste Visible Cells only (Two more ways to do it)
Last week, we talked about how to copy and paste visible cells alone (ie exclude any filtered rows or hidden columns etc.) In the comments section many of you suggested two more ways to deal with this annoying problem. Let’s take a look them.
Copy & paste visible cells only [Excel Trick]
Here is something annoying with Excel.
Open any Excel file with few columns of data. Hide some of those columns (select the columns and press CTRL+0). Now, copy a few rows of data. Paste it else where. Excel will paste the values in hidden columns too. We thought Excel would omit the values in hidden columns.
What the filter Excel?!? I thought we were friends, but you annoy me with some of these quirks.
Use File > Info to quickly unprotect multiple worksheets [Quick tips]
Ever had a workbook with multiple protected worksheets? May be you are enterprise architect at Death Star or chief strategist at Mordor and got all the plans in a tidy little but protected workbook. Of course, you hate having to unprotect many of the worksheets every time you have a new evil plan for world domination. Don’t you worry, you can use this handy little trick to unproect en masse.
- Just open the workbook
- Go to File > Info
- Right on the top, you can see all protected worksheets and a link to unprotect them.
- Click to unprotect the ones you want to.
- Done.
Rounding time to nearest minute or quarter hour etc. [formulas]
The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute. We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.
Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.
Use below formulas to round time in A1.
Jo’s first keyboard shortcut
Jo, my lovely wife quit her job as my partner in crime at Chandoo.org recently and took up a lucrative position at NZ govt. agency. The other day I asked her “how was your day?” when she got home. She smiled and said, “I learned my first Excel shortcut!”.
Guess what it is?
F4.
That is right. The mighty F4 key. You can use it to repeat any action.
Jo was using it to insert rows in her workbook. After inserting first row (using CTRL+ of course), she would press F4 to add more rows as needed.
Selective Sub-totals in Pivot Tables [Quick Tip]
Recently I was creating a pivot report with multiple items in row labels area. I had to show sub-totals, but only for one of the fields. Something like above.
How to show selective sub-totals in Pivot Tables
Hide columns one one tab same way as they were in another place [quick tip]
One of the regular reporting tasks I do involves a manual step I hated. It goes like this:
- Dump several columns of data in the template file.
- Hide a particular set of columns (these are not together, so must be done one at a time or with CTRL+selection)
- Save and publish the file.
After doing this manually for last few fortnights, today I wanted to automate the column hide process. I was about to write a VBA macro to clone the hide settings from one workbook to another. But then I thought, may be paste special can be of use.
And what do you know. It does exactly that.