101 Excel 2013 Tips, Tricks and Timesavers

101 Excel® 2013 Tips, Tricks & Timesavers

Published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774
www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at
www.wiley.com/go/permissions
.

Trademarks:
Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. FULFILLMENT OF EACH COUPON OFFER IS THE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE OFFEROR.

For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002.

For technical support, please visit
www.wiley.com/techsupport
.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013936846

ISBN: 978-1-118-64218-4; ISBN: 978-1-118-64232-0 (ebk); ISBN: 978-1-118-65106-3 (ebk); ISBN: 978-1-118-65114-8 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Author

John Walkenbach
is a leading authority on spreadsheet software, and principal of J-Walk and Associates Inc., a one-person consulting firm based in southern Arizona. John is the author of more than 50 spreadsheet books and has written more than 300 articles and reviews for a variety of publications, including PC World, InfoWorld, PC Magazine, Windows, and PC/Computing. John also maintains a popular website (The Spreadsheet Page,
http://spreadsheetpage.com
) and is the developer of several Excel utilities, including the Power Utility Pak, an award-winning add-in for Excel. John graduated from the University of Missouri and earned a Masters and PhD from the University of Montana.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments at
dummies.custhelp.com
. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002.

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Senior Project Editor: Mark Enochs

Acquisitions Editor: Katie Mohr

Copy Editor: Melba Hopper

Technical Editor: Mike Talley

Editorial Manager: Leah Michael

Vertical Websites Project Manager: Laura Moss-Hollister

Supervising Producer: Rich Graves

Vertical Websites Associate Producers: Josh Frank, Marilyn Hummel, Douglas Kuhn, Shawn Patrick

Editorial Assistant: Annie Sullivan

Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case

Composition Services

Project Coordinator: Katherine Crocker

Layout and Graphics: Melanee Habig

Proofreader: Melissa Cossell

Indexer: BIM Indexing & Proofreading Services

Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies

Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher

Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher

Mary Bednarek, Executive Acquisitions Director

Mary C. Corder, Editorial Director

Publishing for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher

Composition Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Introduction

Excel is a very popular program. Millions of people throughout the world use it on a regular basis. But it’s a safe bet that the vast majority of users have yet to discover some of the amazing things this product can do. If I’ve done my job, you’ll find enough useful information in this book to help you use Excel on a new level.

What You Should Know

This book isn’t a beginner’s guide to Excel. Rather, it’s a book for those who already use Excel but realize that they have a lot more to learn. This book contains 101 tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years, and I’m certain that about 99 percent of all Excel users will find something new and useful in these pages.

If you have absolutely no experience with Excel, this book might not be the best choice for you. To get the most out of this book, you should have some background in using Excel. Specifically, I assume that you know how to accomplish the following tasks with Excel:

→ Create workbooks, insert worksheets, save files, and perform other basic tasks.

→ Navigate through a workbook.

→ Use the Excel Ribbon and dialog boxes.

→ Use basic Windows features, such as file management and copy-and-paste techniques.

What You Should Have

To use this book, you need a copy of Microsoft Excel 2013 for Windows. If you use an older version of Excel, some of the tips won’t apply.

As far as hardware goes for the computer you use to run Excel, the faster, the better. And, of course, the more memory in your system, the happier you’ll be.

Conventions in This Book

Take a minute to skim this section and become familiar with some of the typographic conventions used throughout this book.

Formula listings

Formulas usually appear on a separate line in monospace font. For example, I might list the following formula:

=VLOOKUP(StockNumber,PriceList,2,False)


Excel supports a special type of formula known as an
array formula.
When you enter an array formula, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter (not just Enter). Excel encloses an array formula in curly braces to remind you that it’s an array formula.

Don’t type the curly braces for an array formula. Excel puts them in automatically.

Key names

Names of keys on the keyboard appear in normal type: for example, Alt, Home, PgDn, and Ctrl. When you need to press two or more keys simultaneously, the keys are connected with a plus sign: Press Ctrl+G to display the Go To dialog box.

The Ribbon

Excel 2013 features the Ribbon user interface, which was introduced in Excel 2007.

When you need to select a command by using the Ribbon, I describe the command by using the tab name, the group name, and the command name: for example, Choose Home⇒Alignment⇒Wrap Text. This command translates to “Click the Home tab, locate the Alignment group, and then click the Wrap Text button.”

Some commands use a drop-down Ribbon control. For example: Home⇒Styles⇒Conditional Formatting⇒New Rule. In this case, you need to click the down-pointing arrow on the Conditional Formatting control in order to access the New Rule command.

Many commands begin with the word File. Clicking the File tab takes you to the Backstage View.

Functions, procedures, and named ranges

The names of the Excel worksheet functions appear in all uppercase letters: for example, “Use the SUM function to add the values in column A.”

Unless you’re dealing with text inside quotation marks, Excel isn’t sensitive to case. In other words, both the following formulas produce the same result:

=SUM(A1:A50)


=sum(a1:a50)


Excel, however, converts the characters in the second formula to uppercase.

Mouse conventions

The mouse terminology in this book is all standard fare: pointing, clicking, right-clicking, dragging, and so on. You know the drill.

What the icons mean

Throughout this book, icons appear in the left margin to call your attention to points that are particularly important.

I use Note icons to tell you that something is important — perhaps a concept that can help you master the task at hand or something fundamental for understanding subsequent material.

  I use Caution icons when the operation I’m describing can cause problems if you’re not careful.

  I use the Cross-Reference icon to refer you to other tips that have more to say on a particular topic.

How This Book Is Organized

To provide some semblance of order, I grouped these tips and tricks into six parts:

→ Part I: Workbooks and Files

→ Part II: Formatting

→ Part III: Formulas

→ Part IV: Working with Data

→ Part V: Tables and Pivot Tables

→ Part VI: Charts and Graphics

How to Use This Book

This book really isn’t intended to be read from cover to cover, as you would read a novel — but I’m sure that some people will do so. More likely, you’ll want to use it as a reference book and consult it when necessary. If you’re faced with a challenging task, you may want to check the index first to see whether the book specifically addresses your problem. The order of the parts and tips is arbitrary. Most readers will probably skip around and pick up useful tidbits here and there.

There are also an additional 30 bonus tips that you’ll find at
www.dummies.com/go/101excel2013tips
.

About the Power Utility Pak Offer

Toward the back of this book is a coupon that you can redeem for a discounted copy of my award-winning Power Utility Pak — a collection of useful Excel utilities, plus many new worksheet functions.

You can also use this coupon to purchase the complete VBA source code for a nominal fee. Study-ing the code is an excellent way to pick up some useful programming techniques. You can take the product for a test drive by downloading the trial version from my website at
http://spreadsheetpage.com
.

Power Utility Pak version 7 requires the Windows version of Excel 2007 or later.