Some Useful Excel tips

by Adrienne McGee on January 3rd, 2011

There are lots of useful features in Excel such as AutoFill, and AutoSum.

Here are a couple more:

To insert today's date into a cell, press Ctrl+;

Occasionally, when you try to type something in Excel it changes. This is due to default formatting. For example: if you type in a cell Jan 11, it becomes 11-Jan. Or, you might for some reason want to enter in a fraction. However, 1/2 becomes 2-Jan. Or, you wish to enter in a zip code with leading zeros, but you lose the leading zeros.

These automatic formats can usually be changed by going to the Format Cells dialog. However, another way around it is before you enter in a cell something you know might get reformatted, type in what you want with a leading '. The ' will be stripped away and whatever was typed remains.

Ex: '00454 stays 00454, '1/2 stays 1/2 etc.

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