Unknown Facts About Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is one of the most complex "general office" applications in wide use, with over 300 functions (such as SUM, or IF or AND) defined, in addition to a complete programming environment. A number of little known (and virtually unknown) facts about Excel exist that can save you a lot of keystrokes.
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Show All Formulas
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Hold down the "CTRL" and "~" keys at the same time to toggle Excel to show the formulas in all cells, rather than their results. Pressing it again gets you back to "normal" view.
Disabling the Splash Screen
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Create a new shortcut to Excel and right click on the new shortcut. Select "Properties" and you can edit the target of the shortcut; type " /e" at the very end of the directory path listing to EXCEL.EXE to disable the splash screen.
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Turning Text Into Numbers
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The LEFT, RIGHT and VALUE function in Excel allows you to extract a number from a text field, and treat the result as a number. For example, if you need to extract the ZIP code from an address in cell A1, and have it treated as a number so you can sort it, the formula would be "=VALUE(RIGHT(A1,5))" (The format for LEFT and RIGHT ask for the cell reference and the number of characters to be pulled. In this example, we're pulling the last 5 characters of the contents of cell A1)
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