Excel Tips
Excel 2024: Avoid Whiplash with Speak Cells »
January 30, 2025
One of the painful parts about keying in data is that you have to proofread the numbers. So, you are looking at the sheet of paper, then the screen, then the paper, then the screen. You will end up with a sore neck. Wouldn't it be nice if you had someone to read you the screen so you can keep your eye on the paper? It's built in to Excel.
Excel 2024: Word for Excellers »
January 27, 2025
While Excel fans sometimes tease that Word and PowerPoint are freeware apps that come with Excel, there are times when Microsoft Word offers a feature that Excel does not. In those cases, it makes sense to copy your data from Excel, paste to Word, do the command, then copy back to Excel.
Excel 2024: Get the Countries from a Column of Phone Numbers »
January 21, 2025
Someone had a long list of international telephone numbers. They asked if there is a formula to figure out the country from the phone number. It turns out that Country Codes are complicated. Some are a single digit. Some are 2 or 3 digits.
Excel 2024: Stale Value Formatting »
January 16, 2025
The Excel team added Stale Value Formatting in late 2023. The idea is that you might be working in a workbook with Manual Calculation enable. The strike-through formatting will remind you that certain cells need to be re-calculated.
Excel 2024: See Intermediate Calculations »
January 13, 2025
My friend Mike Girvin at the ExcelisFun YouTube channel has a great trick when explaining a long formula. Mike will select part of the formula in the formula bar and press F9 to calculate just that part of the formula. It is a cool trick, but you must remember to press Escape or you will hard-code the intermediate results in the formula.
Excel 2024: Check Performance in Excel »
January 9, 2025
A new feature debuted in 2023. Go to the Review tab and choose Check Performance. If you have a workbook that you've been using for years, you should check performance. It looks for excess formatting, unused cell styles, unneeded metadata that can slow your workbook down.
Excel 2024: Prevent Default Conversions »
January 3, 2025
Since the beginning of time, Excel has performed some annoying conversions. The conversions happened automatically when you imported from a CSV or Text file, Pasted from another application, or typed data in Excel.
December 31, 2024
In late 2023, Microsoft added a checkbox icon to the Insert tab. As I write this in January 2024, the feature is still in beta. Adding a checkbox to a cell seems to be a special number format that displays True/False values as either checked boxes or unchecked boxes.
Excel 2024: New Scrolling Tricks »
December 25, 2024
Excel now offers horizontal scrolling and smooth scrolling. Smooth scrolling is a popular improvement, particularly for people who store a lot of text in a cell.