Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Leigh Anne Aston on November 19, 2008 at 2:05pm

As an Excel 2007 user, it would have been nice to have a "cheat sheet" that indicated which ribbon contained my most used features. I used search a lot in the beginning months to locate where I needed to look.

A tip/trick I learned several years ago is right clicking on the navigational buttons to the left of the tabs/sheets at the bottom of the workbook displays a listing of all the sheets within the workbook. You can navigate to the sheet you want from the list. I used to use this all the time when I was working in large spreadsheet (sometimes in excess of 50 sheets).

I know there are other tricks I use, but can't think of them off the top of my head. This particular one has the WOW! factor whenever I show it to another Excel user.

Permalink Reply by Kyle McCloud on November 20, 2008 at 7:01am

Thanks Leigh. That very helpful.

Permalink Reply by Deb Lamb on November 20, 2008 at 9:43am

I agree with Leigh Anne, having a cheat sheet would be SO helpful so you can refer to it in an instant. It is time consuming to look up the help or go through the tutorials to find the information you need.

Great tip Leigh Anne! Thanks Kyle for you help as well and looking forward to that cheat sheet!

Permalink Reply by Kyle McCloud on November 20, 2008 at 9:58am

Thanks Deb for the input. I'll about getting this resource up and ready to go soon. In addition to the ribbon, are there any other requests?

Permalink Reply by Leigh Anne Aston on November 20, 2008 at 10:13am

How about discussing (or mentioning) the fact that you cannot have a blank column heading when using a predefined table layout in 2007? This one took a bit of research to figure out why the darn thing kept filling itself in when the text was deleted. A work around is to use a space. If you need to have more than one "blank" column heading, you'll need to use two spaces, then three spaces, etc. You cannot use a column heading more than once.

Permalink Reply by Kyle McCloud on November 20, 2008 at 10:29am

The scope of this one seems to be a little more specialized than the ribbon. Do you have a real world example of why the everyday user would benefit from this tip? Thanks

Permalink Reply by Leigh Anne Aston on November 20, 2008 at 11:19am

I actually had someone ask me if I knew why every time she deleted the text in a column heading, Excel 2007 automatically generated text (Column1) and would not let her leave it blank. She was able to have blank column headings in previous versions of Excel. She had become quite frustrated with it.

I looked at the spreadsheet and was finally able to determine it was the predefined table formatting she was using that was the root of the problem. If you use one of the pretty, predefined table formats, you cannot have a blank column heading. If you delete the text, Excel generates a column heading.

The predefined table formats are great, especially since they adjust the formatting if you add or delete rows/columns -- however, if you want a blank column heading you have to use some sort of work around (text same color as fill, use a space, etc.). The issue was very frustrating and the cause wasn't easily found. I located it in some obscure blog site somewhere.

Permalink Reply by Kyle McCloud on November 20, 2008 at 11:22am

Thanks Leigh. That helps me identify the kind of people who would have that kind of challenge.