#Best trace precedents excel tool how to

There are a lot of these items, so you may need to spend some time perusing. From More Commands you can surf for QAT tools by sub-menu or alphabetically. you simply click on that little down arrow highlighted above, which is on the right-hand-end of the QAT, and it will bring you to some quick adds for the toolbar, and to the all powerful 'More Commands' you see highlighted here.

#Best trace precedents excel tool how to

Of course this wouldn't be complete without showing you how to add these things, so. Combine that with the common keyboard shortcuts and you've got minimal mouse movement and maximal productivity. But why do that when your most used Excel tools can be front and center? I find that combining these QAT tools with the Home ribbon gives me a very large percentage of what I need when on Excel, all on one page/view. Can you use your mouse and click through file menus and ribbons to find this stuff? Yes you can. This tells you some handy facts about your workbook, the most useful of which is size in kb or mb. Thus, it does not pick up all of the hidden row/column data and needlessly paste it at the destination.

Select Visible Cells is great for when you are filtering or manually hiding rows, and doing copy/paste with only the data that is showing.

This one is so useful I should probably move it to the left! It very helpfully freezes, for example, the top row of headers on your spreadsheet, and the leftmost column or two with columnar headings and details.

Freeze Panes is one of the most useful view options out there, and if you don't use it frequently, you should.

The next two are Normal View and PageBreak View, to let you see or hide the printable area of your spreadsheet (I know, printing far less these days, but still sometimes.).

Again, very handy with large, complex spreadsheets.

The next four have to do with grouping and hiding/exposing rows and columns.

To get rid of the arrows you simply hit 'Remove All Arrows'. Tracing precedents lets you see what that cell's data is coming from, while tracing dependents shows you where it is going - all via these handy, clickable arrows that Excel uses. This one is important for any spreadsheet that has a significant number or complexity of formulas.

Trace Precedents, Trace Dependents, and Remove all Arrows.

Speaking of printing, this one lets you set the print area with a simple 'highlight and click'. This takes you to the print preview, where you can see how the spreadsheet will print out, and it also allows quick printer selection. I use this a lot, thus it's position at the far left. Clicking this will attach your file to a new email, leaving you to address and send it - all in seconds and without having to click into other programs and find your way to the file. Nothing is handier than zapping a copy of what you're working on immediately to a colleague.

To be sure, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) with this, so by all means set up your own preferences, but let's do a quick walkthrough of these, from left to right: In fact, I would argue that having a well thought out QAT will save you as much time as many of the most useful keyboard shortcuts available - and that's saying something! Let's use my QAT setup as an example, and along the way I'll show you how easy it it to set up your own favorites.Ībove is a sample useful QAT setup. And Excel a) autosaves, and b) uses the 'ctrl-s' keyboard shortcut, so showing the now ancient 'floppy disc' icon probably mystefies more people than it helps. I think most folks have learned to use 'cntrl-Z' (undo) and 'cntrl-Y' (redo) pretty reflexively by now, so this placement is superfluous. For most people, the QAT sits forever in default mode, showing the nearly useless 'save', 'undo' and 'redo' icons. However, most people don't take advantage of one of Excel's most potent efficiency weapons: the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT for short). It is so efficient at managing and analyzing numbers that it is the de facto standard for desktop data analysis.

Illumeo Customer Success ( Blogs at Illumeo) | Aug 29, 2017Įxcel is everyone's favorite productivity tool and for good reason.