Bringing it all home and making it special....

So, we continue our "Back to Basics" blog run this week. I want to look at the "taken for granted and normally ignored" Home menu.

Yes, this menu contains so many tools that you probably use all the time, you would be forgiven for not investigating any of the more obscure icons. That is what I am for....
 
First off I want to go over some of my favourite tools for making your spreadsheets look good (and it's all about looking good, don't you know! ) I have gone over these in detail in a number of my previous blogs, but for a quick recap:
 
Format Painter
 

This is a fabulous little brush. Use it to copy the formatting from one cell to other cells. So if you had a group of cells that were formatted exactly as you wanted them, and you wanted to copy that formatting to another group of cells, all you do is highlight the formatted cells, click on the format painter, and then click on the cells you want to format. That's it.

 

 

Styles

 



The Styles Menu lets you easily format your cells to pre-designed formats. You can select from the options available by simply clicking on your preferred style type while you have your cell highlighted. You can also adjust the styles available, so for example make the text in the block "Accent 4" bold and italic, by right clicking on the "Accent 4" block and selecting "Modify".
 
These styles will apply to all your worksheets within a workbook. A nice way to ensure all your sheets look uniform and smart.
 
And now for something completely random....
 
I find this next tool really useful for highlighting specific cells. So, for example, you have filtered a number of rows, and you want to delete the data in your filtered cells, but leave the "hidden" rows untouched. You could delete each cell's data separately. You could trust in the goodness of Excel that if you just highlight all the cells and press delete it won't delete the underlying cells. (Sadly, this has happened to me once too often, and the trust has gone, so I am always extra cautious).
 
Or,  you could just use the "Go To Special" tool, which you find here, right at the end of the home menu...
 

 
 
Click on this, and you get a table of various options you can select. For our example, you would use "Visible Cells only".
 
 
 

 

If you just wanted to select all the blank cells in a selection, you select (funnily enough) "Blanks" and so it goes on....

This is just a handy little tool for finding specific types of cells, and one that I have discovered not so  many people are aware of.

So those are my random helpful icons for today. Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to add a comment or get in touch with this link.

Thanks for reading, and happy spreadsheeting!