Have you ever wondered what all the different cursors do in Excel?  Here is a short video to show what they all do and where to place your cursor to achieve your desired task.

Here is a quick short cut you can use to add a time and or date stamp into a cell in Excel.  For a Date Stamp, first select your cell and then press CTRL+; (Control Key and the Semi Colon key).  For the Time Stamp, once again select your cell and then press CTRL+ SHIFT+: (Control Key, Shift Key, and the Colon Key).

There are much easier ways to select a group of data than using your mouse and dragging the cursor. Especially if your mouse occasionally tries to run away.

Depending on what you would like to highlight there are several different keyboard command that use the Shift key.

• Press CTRL+ SHIFT and then press one of your arrow keys and it will select all the data in that row or column in the direction of the arrow key you pressed.
• Press SHIFT and your arrow keys and you will be able to go cell by cell and select a very specific set of data.
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+END and you will select from your selection point to the lowest right hand cell.
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+* and you will select all the data in your document no matter where your selection point is.

Do you have an Excel document that is shared between co-workers? But there is one sheet that you need to make sure isn’t edited.  You can easily protect it by right clicking on the sheet tab and clicking “protect sheet.”  In the new dialog box you can set a password and if you wish even specify further as to which cells can or cannot be edited.

If you use Excel often and are not a fan of the default settings it has set for the font and font size, you can change them and even change the default number of sheets it sets up in a new document!  Here is how:

1. Click the File tab
2. Then click Options
3. Look in the pop up window under General
4. You can make all the changes you want to these default settings here

There are many things that you can do to make Microsoft Excel easier to use and changing your default settings is simple way to do this.

There are many different projects that I have done in Microsoft Word where I have used Templates to save myself some extra work.  But, did you know you can do the same thing in Excel? The next time you open up Excel click on the File tab and then New, and in the second half of your screen check out all the different templates you can use in Excel to help save you some time.  There are templates to help save you time on business projects and personal ones alike. Budgets, invoices, and amortization schedules are just a few of the templates Excel has available. Depending on the template, some even have formulas already inserted and are ready for data to calculate.