Excel can be a real know-it-all sometimes. Do you find yourself fighting with the software when it wants to auto correct certain letters or words that you type in...and that you know are correct? For example, I have a customer number that is WYA and Excel changes it to 'WAY' every time. Well, you can tell Excel not to make these types of corrections anymore! 

Last week, we looked at how to arrange numerous Excel workbooks without have to spread windows out all over the place. But what if you want to arrange multiple worksheets in the same workbook. Can’t be done, right? Wrong! You can definitely do it! Heres's how.

Do you become an Excel contortionist, spreading new windows all over your many monitors every time you need to see data in two or more workbooks at the same time? If you need to view or compare the contents of multiple workbooks, there's a better solution. Clicking the Arrange All button from the Window group on the View tab of the ribbon will present you with several options to accomplish the same thing while saving real estate on your monitors. When the Arrange Windows window opens, you'll see several options: Tiled, Horizontal, Vertical or Cascade.

Welcome to 2019! I took the last two weeks off from posting thanks to the holidays, and now it's time to move forward with a new year and new Excel tips. But since you had two weeks to study the previous blog posts (that's what you were doing with your time off, right?), let's start the year off by looking back with a quiz.

Even though the list of templates comes up first when starting Excel, most people just skip past it, unintentionally preferring the hard road of building new worksheets from scratch. Yet if you want a nicely formatted form, list, chart, or report but you don't have a lot of time - or ideas - Excel provides hundreds of templates at the ready to help you begin your project.

You may have dozens of Excel workbooks that you use, but chances are that there are a select few that you work with frequently and intensely. There are a couple ways within Excel to make those commonly used workbooks faster to access so that you can get your work accomplished with less clicking around.

Now that you've followed Part 1 and Part 2 of our Absolute References series, you may be saying, "Yeah, but it takes a lot of time when creating formulas to type in the dollar sign ($), especially when building long, complicated formulas. Well, there’s a shortcut to fill in the dollar sign quickly and make your work super fast: just use the F4 key.

Last week in Part 1 of this series - before you were crushed under all those leftovers - I showed you a simple Absolute Reference to just one cell. But what if you have multiple references and need to copy the formula into many cells of various rows and columns? You could - if you really, really, really, needed something to do - edit the formula in every result cell to show the correct cell reference. However, a faster option is to use those Absolute References (remember...the dollar sign $). 

Happy almost Thanksgiving!!

Do you spend a lot of time rewriting or editing formulas because the cell references change (e.g. you copy a formula, but you want B2 to remain B2 and not change to C2 or D2 to E2 to on and on, but all your new formulas are broken and displaying error messages)? Using Absolute References correctly can help you avoid this common problem and save quite a bit of time. They can help you so much that our next three posts are going to be dedicated to working with Absolute References. Don't worry...it's mainly pictures.

Have you ever worked late and wished that there was someone to talk? Maybe even someone who could help you do your work? Did you know that Excel can actually speak? And it's a really diligent co-worker, too. Making Excel speak can come in handy if you need someone to read numbers to you while you check them off of a report for the purposes of reconciling the books. It can also recite poetry, but maybe we’ll get to that in another blog…

You might be really excited by now and enthusiastically asking, "How do you make Excel speak?" Remember when we went over customizing the Quick Access Toolbar? We’re going to use that knowledge now to create a shortcut, and then you will have that person - oh okay...that A.I. - that can read numbers to you while you're doing all that reconciling.