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Back by Popular Demand!: Excelling with your Spreadsheets
       written by "Digital" Bill Douthett

One of the main weapons in a producer's arsenal (after surprise and fear) is Microsoft Excel. And while most people are comfortable with the idea of adding up a column of numbers, there's a lot more Excel can do for you.

This month, we'll take a look at some tips and tricks that can make Excel an even more formidable tool.

Excel Tips for the Producer:

Tip 1 - Make room for data: Often when working with a spreadsheet, you'll get numbers that are too big for a column, or you'll open a file where all the columns are at their "default" width. Did you know that Excel knows how to make the columns exactly the width they need to be to display your data? All you have to do is double-click on the divider line between the 2 columns and Excel will make the column on the left of the line exactly the right width. And what if you need to fix a whole spreadsheet's worth of columns? Just Select All (ctrl-A in Windows, command-A on Mac) and click on any column divider. PRESTO!

Note the pound signs (#) where the column is too narrow, and the cursor double-clicking on the column divider		After resizing, the contents of all the cells can be seen, and they fit exactly!

 

Tip 2 - Between the sheets: Many people just open Excel and start working on whatever their document needs to be. But Excel is much better at organizing your work on a project than you might think.

The Sheet tabs at the bottom of the document

At the bottom of the Excel window you'll see tabs named "Sheet 1" through "Sheet 3". Each of these is an independent spreadsheet (although you can link numbers together like the AICP budget form does), and can be used to track the different aspects of a project. EXTRA COOL TIP : Right-click (Mac users control-click) on the tab of a given sheet, and you can rename it, move it or copy (duplicate) it. So if you want to try different scenarios, you can duplicate a sheet, and try your changes. Also handy for tracking the evolution of a data set.

Right click on any sheet's tab to see the sheet menu

 

Tip 3 - Freeze frame: Excel can handle a LOT of information: hundreds of rows and columns - even more than the biggest monitor can display. So if you're making a large budget spreadsheet, you may find that you're constantly scrolling from one end of the sheet to the other, just so you can see what the headings are by the time you've scrolled all the way out.

Excel has a nifty trick just for master number crunchers like you. If you look at the right side of the horizontal scroll bar, and the top of the vertical scroll bar, you'll see an extra little button, which, if you drag it out, will split the window into two panes, which can scroll independently. The EXTRA COOL TIP is to set the split point just below (or to the right of) your heading column that you're always scrolling back to see. Then select Window > Freeze Panes, and the split will be smoothed over and become a part of your spreadsheet. You can always reverse the process, by selecting "Unfreeze Panes" and "Remove Split" from the window menu!

Select the Horizontal Split tool (top) or the Vertical Split (bottom)

Adjusting a Horizontal Split to a point just below the headings

To make the split less obvious and locked in place, select Freeze Panes from the Window Menu

Tip 4 - If it isn't on the page:  You've created your master spreadsheet of actuals, and it looks like you're going to do very well. Of course you want to print it, but it's got so many rows and columns, how will you ever fit it on a page? Simple. YOU don't have to - Excel will!

There's an option in the Page Setup that's often overlooked. Check out "Fit to Page" under the Scaling section. You can tell Excel to figure out almost any combination, from cramming it all onto one page (1 wide, 1 tall) to any number of pages that suits your need. The EXTRA COOL TIP is to set it to 1 Wide, and leave the "tall" box empty, and Excel will figure out that at the width of 1 page, how many pages long your document needs to be.

The Fit to Pages section of the Page setup. Entering "1" in both will fit your entire spreadsheet on to 1 page. WARNING: May be really, really tiny! ;-)		Leave the box next to "tall" blank to make Excel figure out how many pages it needs, with the width at 1.

We hope these tips will make your time spent crunching the numbers in your spreadsheets even more Excel-lent!