Today's Time Warp Wednesday Podcast: Secret Menu Items - Episode 104 will reveal how to unlock powerful menu items in Excel.
Transcript of the video:
Welcome back to the MrExcel podcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
We've been talking about menus and toolbars for the past couple of days.
Now, did you know that the Shift key can be used to change the action of many toolbar icons, and also to show you secret menu items?
A-Z button on a standard toolbar is a great way to sort something in ascending order, and the Z-A button is a great way to sort something in descending order.
But you don't really need both of these buttons, if you press the Z-A button while holding down the Shift key, the data will be sorted in ascending order.
It turns out that many of the icons on the standard and formatting toolbars will do the reverse action if you hold down the Shift key.
It works for the Sort button, it works for the increase and decrease Indent, it works for the increase and decrease Decimal.
There's also a trick, if you hold down the Shift key, many of the menu items will show alternate options that are only available when you hold down the Shift.
For example, right now, I have five workbooks open.
If I wanted to close all of these workbooks while keeping Excel open, I would have to do File, Close, File, Close, and so on 5 times.
Well, it's not really necessary, if I hold down the Shift key and go to the File menu, sure enough, there's a new option, a secret option called Close All.
So experiment with using the Shift key to get some great options from Excel.
Thanks for joining me and check back tomorrow for another tip from MrExcel!
We've been talking about menus and toolbars for the past couple of days.
Now, did you know that the Shift key can be used to change the action of many toolbar icons, and also to show you secret menu items?
A-Z button on a standard toolbar is a great way to sort something in ascending order, and the Z-A button is a great way to sort something in descending order.
But you don't really need both of these buttons, if you press the Z-A button while holding down the Shift key, the data will be sorted in ascending order.
It turns out that many of the icons on the standard and formatting toolbars will do the reverse action if you hold down the Shift key.
It works for the Sort button, it works for the increase and decrease Indent, it works for the increase and decrease Decimal.
There's also a trick, if you hold down the Shift key, many of the menu items will show alternate options that are only available when you hold down the Shift.
For example, right now, I have five workbooks open.
If I wanted to close all of these workbooks while keeping Excel open, I would have to do File, Close, File, Close, and so on 5 times.
Well, it's not really necessary, if I hold down the Shift key and go to the File menu, sure enough, there's a new option, a secret option called Close All.
So experiment with using the Shift key to get some great options from Excel.
Thanks for joining me and check back tomorrow for another tip from MrExcel!