Improving your Excel skills is a top opportunity to claw back a few minutes of work every day, which soon turn into hours and hours of saved time every week and month.  Whether you’re a master at Excel  and maybe use it as a Staff Holiday & Absence Planner or if you just know the basic and find it a quick way to add up lots of numbers, you should find these tips helpful.

Automatic Adding with ALT + =

Quickly add up the value of an entire column or row by clicking in the first empty cell in the column. Then just hit ALT and = to add up the numbers in every cell above. The sum will then appear in the cell you highlighted.

Jump to the Start or End of a Column

Scrolling through thousands of columns is fine if you have time to play with, but chances are you don’t. The quickest way to navigate to the start and end of columns is to hit CTRL and the up or down arrows to jump to the top or drop to the very bottom of the column instantly.

Repeat a Formula

You need never type out the same formula over and over, ever again. This nifty little trick populates all of the cells in a column with the same formula, but alters to use the data specific to each row. Clever old Excel. First of all, tap in the formula you need in the first cell. Next, move your cursor to the lower right hand corner of that cell, and when it turns into a plus sign, double click the cell to copy your formula over to the rest of the cells in this column.

Adjust Width

It’s very easy to adjust a column to fit the exact width of its content and lose all those untidy ##### entries. Click on your column header, move your cursor to the right side of the header and simply double click when it turns into a plus sign.

Tab Between Worksheets

Jumping from worksheet to worksheet without your hand leaving the keyboard with this super time-saving trick.  To move your view to the next worksheet along, enter CTRL + PGDN. Move to the left by hitting CTRL + PGUP.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to Excel cheats so feel free to comment below or in the forum with your best time-saving hacks and tricks when working in Microsoft Excel. Go on – share the love with your fellow Practice Managers!