How to use Date & Time values in Excel – 10 + 3 tips
Excel date time features are very handy and knowing how to use Excel date values can help you save a ton of time in your day to day spreadsheet chores. Let us prepare for your date with the sheet using these 10 handy tips.
Before jumping on to the tips, it helps to know how excel represents the date and time.
Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential numbers … January 1, 1900 is serial number 1, and 28 July, 2021 is serial number 44405 because it is 44,405 days after January 1, 1900. Excel stores times as decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day.
Read on to learn more.
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.
CP043: My favorite time saving features of Excel, Revealed.
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In the 43rd session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about top time saving features of Excel.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Quick announcement about Awesome August
- My 9 favorite time saving features of Excel
- Remove Duplicates
- Tables
- Pivot Tables
- Auto fill
- Format Painter
- Find & Replace
- VBA / Macro Recorder
- Auto save
- Auto complete / Intellisence
- Recap & Conclusions
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.
Save time with custom ribbons in Excel [tutorial]
A significant portion of our time in Excel is spent navigating between various ribbon tabs and clicking buttons. Wouldn’t it be better if you can combine all the frequently used features in to one ribbon? Something like above:
Read on to learn how to create, edit and share custom ribbons in Excel.
Write faster formulas with Auto-correct
Want to write formulas faster? Here is a quick tip.
Use Auto-correct!
That is right. Excel’s auto-correct feature can be setup to help you write formulas faster. See above demo. Read on for details.
Open & Save files faster in Excel 2013 [quick tip]
Excel 2013, the newest version of Excel as of writing this has many great features like data modeling, improved pivot tables, power view, flash fill etc. But one thing that I find very annoying is the Open & Save experience. Any time we open a file or save a workbook (which happens alot everyday), we must navigate the painful backstage screen to select our favorite folders. You see, Excel 2013 supports cloud saving. So that means, by default it will show your Office 365 or OneDrive or SkyDrive or whatever fancy new name Microsoft has for these things. But I am not so much in to clouding. Heck, I see a passing cloud in the sky and I almost run inside my house. So what to do?
Simple. We can turn off these features.