If you're still recovering from New Year's Eve, the last thing you want is another headache. So this is a good time for a new set of Microsoft Excel tips that can help prevent headaches by helping make your efforts to navigate Microsoft Office's spreadsheet smoother and less stressful.
This is the eighth series in our roundup of Office 2010 tips. We're focusing on Excel this time around, but our tips about Microsoft's animated guide to the Ribbon interface and about the high-capacity Office Clipboard apply to the other major Office apps as well.
You don't need to be a spreadsheet wiz to use these tips. You don't even have to understand Excel's formulas. But this series of tips can help you cut down on keystrokes and errors, and it can save you a lot of time and trouble with housekeeping tasks such as opening two or more worksheets at the same time. We also show you how to warn your colleagues—or yourself—when they or you try to enter alphabetical data into a cell that requires only numbers.
One of our tips—the one about Excel's TRANSPOSE function—is useful in itself, but it's also a quick introduction to Excel's little-known but ultrapowerful array functions that make it possible to manipulate large blocks of data with a single command. Excel's array functions aren't exactly user-friendly, which is probably why the standard Excel interface scarcely reveals their existence, but once you get the hang of them, you may wonder how you managed without them.
Whatever your level of Excel expertise, you'll find a technique worth remembering among these ten New Year's tips. Click on the slideshow above to read the rest of our Excel 2010 tips story.
Looking for even more Microsoft Office 2010 tips? Check out the rest of our ongoing series.
• Microsoft Office 2010: 10 Tips and Tricks
• Microsoft Office 2010: 10 More Tips and Tricks
• 10 Expert Tips for Microsoft Word
• 10 Excellent Tips for Microsoft Excel 2010
• 10 Simple Outlook 2010 Tips
• 10 Tips for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2010
• How to Use Outlook Better: 10 Tips