January 2006 Issue
Page 4

COMPUTER CORNER

Excelling With EXCEL

Changing directions: With so many places (or cells) to go to in Excel, navigation expertise is essential to productivity. One of the simplest-but often overlooked-forms of navigation is the Enter key. By default, when you press Enter, the cursor goes to the next cell down. But it doesn't have to be that way. To change the default direction to right, left, or up, select Tools, Options, click the Edit tab, check the Move selection after Enter box, and then select your direction choice from the pull down menu. Then click OK.

Moving from one worksheet to another is as simple as clicking the Sheet tabs at the bottom of the screen. But if you want to keep your hands on the keyboard, press <Ctrl>-<PageUp> and <Ctrl>-<Page Down> to toggle through each sheet.

Time for a page break: Unlike with dating, in Excel, breaking up is not hard to do-but clean page breaks are essential. Have you ever printed a worksheet only to find a few stray columns or rows orphaned on a separate page? To avoid this problem, preview where the page breaks are set to fall. Select View, Page Break Preview. The first time you visit, you will see a welcome screen that's not particularly helpful. Check the box offering not to show it again. Use the vertical and horizontal scroll bars to view the breaks. Pages will be marked with large labels and page breaks with bold lines. You can then adjust the break lines with your mouse.

To manually set a page break, select the cell that will be the first one on the next page. Choose Insert, Page Break from the menu. To remove a page break, select Insert, Remove Page Break.

Fill 'er up with AutoFill: Excel can remove the drudgery of entering sequences of numbers, dates, days of the week, months, or years, among other boilerplate items. All you need to do is enter one or two items of a sequence in succeeding cells (rows or columns) and AutoFill can do the rest. Here are some examples:

• Fill in a series of numbers: To try this out, enter the number 1 in one cell and 2 in the next, then highlight both of those cells. Now hover your cursor over the small black square in the lower right of the selection until the cursor turns into a plus sign (not the plus sign with arrows). Next, drag the corner down or across and in each succeeding cell, Excel will fill the cells with increments of 1 (3, 4, 5, and so forth). If you originally entered 100 and 200, the cells would be AutoFilled with 300, 400, and so on.
• Fill in dates: Similarly, enter a single day of the week or month of the year, and Excel will AutoFill each succeeding day or month. When it reaches the end of a series of named days, it will repeat them again in order until the end of your selection. At the end of a month's worth of dates, it will automatically go into the next month. Excel will even fill in a sequence of years or quarters beginning with the one you start with such as 2004, 2005, 2006 or Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4.

By default, AutoFill copies both the formats and values of the cells you choose. To select one or the other, hold down the right mouse key while dragging. Upon release, choose Fill Formatting Only or Fill Without Formatting. If you don't like how AutoFill has filled cells, click AutoFill Smart Tag to display more options.

Shortcuts

Listed below are keyboard shortcuts you can use to save time:

Control C = Copy
Control V = Paste
Control B = Bold
Control I = Italic
Control U = Underline
Control A = Highlight all Text
Control S = Save File
Control O = Open File
Control P = Print File
Control Z = Undo the last operation

MLS QUARTERLY STATISTICS 4TH QUARTER 2005

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