MS Excel – 3 Top Tips for Instant Productivity!

MS Excel – 3 Top Tips for Instant Productivity!

These are my top three tips for getting immediate results with Microsoft Excel. By using these tips you could save dozens of hours, working in creative tasks rather than repetitive ones.

1. Create a graphic in a second!

The fastest way to create a graphic is just to select the list of values you want to include…

… and press the F11 key! That will instantly create a new graphic, which can be enhanced afterwards.

2. Adjust the way you print your spreadsheet!

If you want to control how and in how many pages your spreadsheet will print, just select in the menu “File” option “Page setup”. In the Page Setup window look for the “Scaling” options, and in “Fit to” you can tell Excel how many pages to use for the width and height of your document.

For example you have a 10 row list that has 10 columns. When you print it you get the first 8 columns in a page and the other 2 in another, you can make Excel fit all the 10 columns in a single page by entering the value “1″ in the width textbox. You have just adjusted the width of your table, without having to test and test adjusting the width of your columns or the size of the font.

3. Freeze the column headers

When you have a list with a lot of rows you will most probably lose sight of the column headers as you go down the list. To keep them in sight just use the “Freeze Panes” option in menu “Window”.

Imagine your column headers are in row 4, and your list items begin on row 5. Select row 5 (you can just click on the left gray row number), then open menu “Window” and click option “Freeze Panes”. Now you don’t need to keep remembering which column means what, or have to keep going up and down the list to find out.

As you have seen these simple tips can give you a control of what you see and print in Excel, and will save you a lot of time and effort… if you put them to work.

Of course, these tips are just the beginning. There are hundreds of shortcuts and tricks that can boost your productivity with Microsoft Excel, which are so easy to learn and practice.