Great tips for MS Excel

Over the last few month I have been working on Microsoft Office for some important assignments. And while working on it I learned some new things that I would like to share with you people.


Below are the tips and tricks to use Microsoft Excel:

Working with date and time in your data: If your data has lots of date and time, you can change the format of the date and time as desired. To do that right click the entire row which contains date and time and click the FORMAT CELLS – hit the NUMBER tab. Popup showing you the possible date formats will be given. Similarly you can work on other data formats also depending on what your data is, for example general, number, currency, date, time, percentage etc.

You have copy pasted the data say from a word file or some website into your excel, but the data is not dumped properly in the excel file. What do you do? Simple copy-paste the data first into a notepad and then from there copy again and paste it into your excel file. Notepad removes all the formatting that goes with the data while copying it from such sources.

You have copied the data from a source to MS Excel, but there are lots of blank cells in between the data range. You want to get rid of these blank cells. How do you do that? Select the entire data range, hit F5 button from your keyboard, a GoTo dialog box will open, click on the button ‘Special’ from the bottom left of that dialog box, you will get many options to chose from, select BLANKS and hit OK, on doing so only the blank cells will be selected, you can now very carefully right click on any 1 of the blank cell (make sure you don’t click anywhere outside the blank cell) and say delete. This will delete all the blank cells from your data range.

The GoTo dialog box selects the data which has the formatting or similar data as the option you have selected in the SPECIAL box. You have many options to chose from here.

There are other mathematical formulas that MS excel can perform within no seconds with just one click like: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division etc.

To add numbers: Select an empty cell, and click on the Summation icon (for those who do not know what summation icon is it is found in the toolbar), and select the data you want to add and hit keyboard enter key and it is done.

For Subtraction: Select an empty cell, type = and then select the first number which you want to subtract and then type the minus sign – and select the second number and hit the keyboard enter key. Same goes for other mathematical operations like multiplication and division.

Well this is just for the starters. There is lots more to come in my next blog, so keep waiting, and yes don’t forget to share your tips and tricks on excel by commenting on this blog.

-Stella Roy

Life of your Laptop

Just last week Intel launches a new series of ‘Metro Notebook’ that is one quarter inch thicker then the Motorola Razr.

The speed at which the Notebook is getting sleeker day by day, it wont be a surprise if someday we will have Notebook the size of Nokia N95 cell phone. Image yourself carrying Dell, Compaq, IBM or HP Notebook in your pocket with 120 GB HDD space and Intel Duo core processor. I wish I could get such Laptop from Dell or IBM soon. As we try to handle different things in our daily life we always ignore to take care of our computers or Laptops.

In this article, I would like to talk about some tips to keep your Notebook in the best working condition.

• Never expose your Notebook to direct sunlight for more then 15 mins.
• If you are using your Notebook as a desktop machine, it’s better to attach an external keyboard and mouse. This will increase the life of your keypads.
• Make sure that the outer air vents are free of dust. This helps in providing better cooling to the Notebook processor and HDD.
• The LCD of Notebook should be cleaned with non-abrasive cloth or soft towel. Avoid using Newspaper and plastics to clean your LCD
• The Notebook batteries should be charge/discharge periodically to get better longer battery life and better performance. Also configure your power settings to shut off the display after 5 minutes of inactivity.
• Run Disk Defragmenter once in a month. Doing this will give access to your documents much faster.
• Use the best quality carry bag, preferably a leather one that the Notebook manufacturer supplies with the Laptop.
• Use the diagnostic tool that comes with the Notebook to detect any defect in the Notebook at least one in two months.
• Always go for extended warranty. This saves lot of money in case you have a Hardware issue with you Notebook.

There are many more tips to keep your Laptop in great condition but I think that you need to tell me by giving comments.

-Stella Roy