Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By : David Ringstrom
Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By: David Ringstrom

Overview of this book

David Ringstrom coined the phrase “Either you work Excel, or it works you!” after observing how many users carry out tasks inefficiently. In this book, you’ll learn how to get more done with less effort. This book will enable you to create resilient spreadsheets that are easy for others to use as well, while incorporating spreadsheet disaster preparedness techniques. The time-saving techniques covered in the book include creating custom shortcuts and icons to streamline repetitive tasks, as well as automating them with features such as Tables and Custom Views. You’ll see how Conditional Formatting enables you to apply colors, Cell icons, and other formatting on-demand as your data changes. You’ll be empowered to protect the integrity of spreadsheets and increase usability by implementing internal controls, and understand how to solve problems with What-If Analysis features. In addition, you’ll master new features and functions such as XLOOKUP, Dynamic Array functions, LET and LAMBDA, and Power Query, while learning how to leverage shortcuts and nuances in Excel. By the end of this book, you’ll have a broader awareness of how to avoid pitfalls in Excel. You’ll be empowered to work more effectively in Excel, having gained a deeper understanding of the frustrating oddities that can arise daily in Excel.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Improving Accessibility
6
Part 2:Spreadsheet Interactivity and Automation
12
Part 3: Data Analysis

Undo and Redo

No matter how assiduous we are about saving our work, often, we’re just one keystroke or mouse click away from a spreadsheet catastrophe. For instance, Excel can, and does, crash without notice, making your work suddenly vanish from the screen. However, that’s an extreme example—it’s much more likely that you’ll delete the wrong data or accidentally paste over the wrong area of your worksheet. In such instances, pressing Ctrl + Z (or + Z in Excel for macOS) will put things back. If you want to undo up to the last 100 actions in your workbook, you can click on the Undo drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 2.1, and select a series of consecutive actions to reverse:

Figure 2.1 – Available actions to undo

One hidden benefit of Undo is the ability to redo the actions that you’ve undone. This means that you can roll a spreadsheet back up to 100 steps to see how things looked at that point, and...