Most of us are quite familiar with Microsoft Excel and use it frequently in our day to day lives to collate data, keep records, calculations and various other purposes. It is a commercial spreadsheet application featuring charts, graphs and histograms that can be generated using the different rows and columns. However, Microsoft Excel is far more useful than many of us would like to believe. Do you wish to explore the very many things that you can do with Microsoft Excel? Frank Johnson has prepared a special list of tips to make the most of this wonderful application.

Microsoft Excel has many, many features. Knowing even a few additional features can simply many of your computing and data recording tasks and save you a lot of time and efforts. Let us get started with knowing the best tips to use Microsoft Excel.

Formatting with MS Excel

If you wish to format your data using MS Excel, you can use the AutoFormat option. Using this option can help you highlight all the relevant information and make it stand out in the rest of the data. There are 17 different AutoFormat styles available and you can choose any one to make your spreadsheets look more professional as well as easy to read.

Apart from AutoFormat, you can also use the Format Painter option in Microsoft Excel. This formatting option allows you to render a particular style of formatting to a group of cells in a quick and easy manner. This option is found to be quite helpful, especially of you wish to include new data and format the new cells created in a way that they match the previously include data and cell format.

Should you want, you can also change the color of the sheet tabs using MS Excel. This option is especially available in the MS Excel 2003 version and is particularly useful if you are working with very large spreadsheets and want a faster and easier navigation through them. This is also helpful in highlighting relevant or important data.

Did you know that you could add or delete extra columns and rows to your Excel spreadsheet in order to be able to accommodate new data or do away with the old or unwanted one, with a simple click of the mouse? Well, Microsoft Excel makes it swift and easy! Thus, you can change the layout of your spreadsheet before you have even finished compiling it!

Now that you know a few more ways to use Microsoft Excel and format your data, go ahead and explore the features!

Creating Charts with MS Excel
Microsoft Excel allows you to change the default Excel chart type to suit your own linkings. If you wish to create a customized Excel chart, MS Excel makes it possible. Plus, you can also make use of the custom formatting to make your chart look just as you want it to look. If you want, you can even save this custom formatting to use for other charts in future. Creating custom charts in Microsoft Excel is quick and easy. You can create One-Touch Excel charts. This feature comes very handy when you need to generate a chart on an instant basis or in a hurry. You can also use this functionality to check certain data trends and generate an instant chart using default or customized Excel chart settings.

There is yet another functionality that you can make the most of – that of using Excel’s flowchart templates. Microsoft does offer a number of free templates to create simple flowchart diagrams in Excel 97 version and upwards. You can download them from Microsoft and use them to represent your data or process in the form of flowchart diagrams.

Here’s hoping that these tips on using MS excel would help you explore several other features and functionalities of this application and make the most of them to collate, store and represent your data.

Frank Johnson is a regular editorial contributor on technology products and services that help small to mid size businesses.  To know more about the best ways to use Microsoft Excel, you may interact with him here

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