While we’re on the subject of toolbars and the customise dialog, I would recommend to all Excel/Office users the following tip. Turn OFF the show menu after short delay option and turn ON the always show full menu option. Again this can be found in the customise dialog, under the options tab. Checking this option will force Excel to display the whole menus and lets you see all of the menu items
Ribbons about turn!
Microsoft hold the average user has 4 or more toolbars displayed at any one time. This represents quite a lot of the screen “real-estate”. This is especially pertinent with the advent of “wide screen” type set ups popular on many laptops. A colleague of mine has about 25 rows on display, that’s on a 17″ screen! (well, “wide screen”).
I believe is that many uses pull up a menu bars and end up keeping the whole thing, for just a few of the buttons. But its easy to streamline your toolbars in excel.
Position your mouse somewhere on a toolbar (it’s best if you go for a place where there are no buttons). Right clicking will bring up a context menu, at the very bottom of which is a “Customise” option Click it!
Next click the “Commands” tab, from here you can pick all of you favourite buttons, and simply drag them all on to ONE tool bar. Better than that, you can even drag them on to the Menu bar (which it’s self is a toolbar).
If you can’t find the button you’re looking for, try clicking on the “Toolbars” tab, then checking the tool bar which holds the button you’re after. This displays the toolbar, and you can now drag and drop the button direct from the toolbars on the screen.
Now that’s better, I’ve got my screen back!!!!
Sometimes we want to hide our data but still display the values in a chart. By defult Excel will remove the chart content when we hide rows or colunms.
The answer is to change a setting in the Excel Maze, sorry options box.
Select the chart you wish to change then goto: Tools > Options > ;Chart
then unselect the “Plot Visible Cells Only” option.
Another option to consider is putting the data in another worksheet then hiding that sheet.
Maybe I’ve missed the boat on this one but I never knew you could open an Access table directly inside excel, I’ve always exported them to .xls files in Access, or used Get Extrenal Data. In Excel, file open (pick all from the type drop down) and click on the Access DB, give you this:
Cliciking the table will import it into excel – i guess it errors out when you go over 65537!
