Recently, I bought a new laptop, because my old Toshiba died down. After installing the OS and other necessary tools (like browser, skype etc.), I have installed Office 2010. Since Excel is my bread and butter, I like to customize it so that I can get more work done.
So today,let me share how I customized my newly installed Excel and ask you the same question.
Customizing Excel from Excel Options
The first thing I do after opening Excel, is go to File > Excel Options.
Here, we can customize various Excel default behaviors.
Only one worksheet instead of 3
To begin with, I want to have only 1 sheet on my new workbooks as I seldom work with 2 or 3 sheets.
Change the user name
Since many of my workbooks are emailed to clients or uploaded on chandoo.org for you to download, I want to use our website address (chandoo.org) as my username.
Enable Developer Ribbon
After this, I went to customize ribbon and checked the Developer Ribbon box. This ensures that I can see the developer ribbon in Excel so that I can use features like form controls, macros etc.
Note: If you are using Excel 2007, you can find this in Popular tab in Excel Options.
Disable Error Checking Options
Excel has a friendly feature called as error checking. By default this is enabled and Excel shows warning messages whenever you have made some predefined errors while using Excel. For example, you would get a warning whenever your formulas omit adjacent cells in a region.
While this is useful, I find it annoying as most of the time I know what I am doing. So I disabled almost all of the error checking rules except the ones that I want.
You can do this from Formula options in Excel Options screen.
Tell Excel to take frequent backups of your files
Since the work I do in Excel feeds my family, I want to make sure nothing is lost. Apart from using external back-up applications, I want to use built-in backup features in Excel. You can set these settings from Save tab in Excel options.
Customize Quick Access Toolbar
There are quite a few things in Excel that I use on regular basis. To begin with, I use shapes, alignment tools, text-box, select objects on regular basis. So I add these to my QAT. I will be adding more items to QAT as I use more features on this laptop’s Excel.
Adding Excel to Taskbar
This next is not an Excel tip but Windows tip. Since I use Excel thru-out the day, I just add it to taskbar (by right clicking on Excel in Programs and choosing Pin to task bar.)
What about you?
Those are the bare-minimum customizations I made to my Excel 20101.
What about you? How do you customize your own Excel to make it productive & easy to use. Please share using comments.
More Tips on Customizing Excel
If you want to use Excel productively, then customizing how it behaves is the first step. Here are some handy ideas you can try,
- 10 Tips to make better & boss-proof spreadsheets in Excel
- How to create new ribbons in Excel 2010
- Pin frequently used documents to Excel’s file menu
- 15 Productivity Tips for Excel users (Excel 2003 and above)
- How to add your macros to Quick Access Toolbar
- More Excel Productivity Tips, Keyboard Shortcuts & Mouse Shortcuts
PS: Wish you a happy weekend. We are taking the kids to Safari World today (Friday), for a day of giraffes, monkeys, dolphins, elephants and sun.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.