Do you like those inspiring combinations of words and pictures you see on many social media sites?
Photo courtesy of National Archives of Canada. Children Reading Art books 1931-1959. Quote courtesy of ebookfriendly.com
You can use PowerPoint to combine pictures and words and then use the Save Ascommand. Select the JPG type. Perfect for uploading to your social media feeds. Here’s a link to the PowerPoint template sized for Twitter pictures I used to create the above sized for Twitter pictures I used to create the picture above. You are welcome to download and use it.
Freezing panes is a basic tool to make a large spreadsheet easier to work with. In my social media spreadsheet I like to freeze the header row into position. Then no matter how far I scroll down the sheet, the columns are labelled.
To turn on frozen panes, select the cell below the row & column you wish to freeze into position. Since I don’t want to freeze any columns, I select cell A2.
Freezing Panes using the Active Cell position” width
Select the View Ribbon, Click on the Freeze Panesbutton, and choose Freeze Panes(or Freeze Top Rowin this scenario).
Freezing Panes Results
Now you can scroll for hundreds of rows, and each column is nicely labelled – no guessing!
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
The Select Visible Cells Only button on the Quick Access Toolbar
The Select Visible Cells Only function is so useful, I like to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in Excel. These instructions are based on Excel 2010, but will be similar in all current versions of Excel.
Quick Access Toolbar Customization
The Quick Access Toolbar starts in the top right corner of the Excel window. The customize button is circled in red. Clicking on that button displays the menu shown below.
Move the QAT under the ribbon
The first change I like to make is to its’ position. I like to move it under the Ribbon, since there will be more room for buttons there. Over time I tend to fill the QAT up with frequently used tools.
After I move the QAT below the ribbon, I go hunting for useful commands to add. Click the More Commands… option and the Customize the Quick Access Toolbardialog opens up.
Customize the Quick Access Toolbar – Popular Commands
The dialog box defaults to Popular Commands. Try scrolling through this list and find the Format Painter. Press the Addbutton, to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. This is a useful tool to have at hand!
By clicking on the Choose commands fromdrop-down list, a selection will be displayed.
Drop-down list of source commands.
Select All Commandsfrom this list. Hundreds of Excel commands will display, and this is where it is useful to know the name of the command you are looking for. Scroll until you find Select Visible Cells.
Finding the Select Visible Cells command
Select it, Click on the Addbutton, and click OK.
Simply select the cells you wish to copy and press the Select Visible Cellsbutton. Paste your information and only what you see will be pasted.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
I built my Social Media spreadsheet in an Excel spreadsheet with all the tools I want built in (formulas, conditional formatting and data validation). Ultimately, I will transfer my information into a stripped down spreadsheet in csv (comma separated) format. This is the format that Google Calendars will accept.
When I transfer my posts to this spreadsheet, I don’t want to include any blank rows AND I only want to copy and paste once. How do I perform this little piece of magic? I use the Excel command for selecting visible cells only.
Go To Special Dialog, select Visible cells only
Tucked away in the Go To Specialdialog is the option for selecting only the visible cells in a region. This takes what could be multiple copy/paste operations and condenses them into one step.
First filter your data so that blanks do not appear, then press the F5 function key to bring up the Go Todialog box.
Press the Specialbutton to open the Go To Specialdialog box, choose Visible cells onlyand press OK. Now when you copy the selected cells, only the cells you can see are copied.
In my next post I’ll show the method to put this useful button on your Quick Access Toolbar.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Since Excel 2007, the Filter tool has been on the Home ribbon, under the Sort and Filterdrop-down. The Filter tool can be applied to any spreadsheet where every row is a new record. Excels’ guesses about what and how to filter will be more accurate if the data has a header row. Your (human) life will be easier if you give that row a little formatting to make it stand out from the data.
If your data has gaps, select all the data (including the header row) and apply the filter. Once the filter has been applied, little triangles will appear beside each header label.
Filtering Drop-Down panel
Now you can use each header to filter the data. Click on the filter drop-down and the panel will open as you can see in the picture above. Clear the check boxes beside the entries you don’t want to see. Then click the OKbutton. You can spot filtered data, because the row headers will be bright blue (and row numbers will be missing as data is filtered out). The columns where filtering is applied will have a filter icon (circled in red in the picture).
Filtering Applied
Once the filters are in place, I can filter out blanks or filter blanks in to find openings in our social media schedule. I can quickly look for Posts and Tweets with images, to ensure the image information is present. I can filter down to a single subject. All of these filters make managing my posting schedule MUCH easier.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
When building my Social Media spreadsheet, I want to enter my subject keywords and trigger keywords consistently. Minor typos can make it difficult to find all the relevant posts and worse; prevent scheduled posts, tweets and pins from being published on time. This is why I find the Data Validation feature in Excel so useful. As you can see in the picture above, once Data Validation is in action, my data entry is restricted to a preset list of options.
Find the Data Validation tool on the Data ribbon
Since Excel 2007, the Data Validation tool has been on the Data Ribbon. Simply select the cells you want to apply Data Validation to and press the Data Validationbutton and select Data Validation. Then the Data Validation Settingsdialogue box will appear.
Data Validation Settings
To keep the active sheet “clean”, I use a named range on another sheet as my data source (I’ve talked about that previously). Here you can see it’s called PostTypes. But you can enter short lists directly into the Source box:
Data Validation Settings
However, I find in the long run (especially for long lists) keeping the list source on another sheet makes maintenance easier.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
In my Social Media spreadsheet I want to add 30 minutes to the starting time for the post. Why 30 minutes? That’s the default scheduling time in Google Calendar.
To do this, I use the TIME function. The TIME function has 3 arguments; hour, minute and seconds – all three arguments are required. So my formula would look something like this:
=F2+TIME(0,30,0)
So, I’m adding 30 minutes to the value from cell F2. Easy!
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Flash Fill was introduced in 2013, but I have clients who are just upgrading to 2013 this year. This is the kind of feature that makes upgrading worthwhile.
Flash Fill is a new tool introduced in Excel 2013. Its a simple tool to handle a frequent problem. You have a small set of data and you need to break it apart into separate columns or join separate columns of data together.
Previously, I would have handled it with a series of text functions in Excel (LEFT, RIGHT, MID) combined with FIND and LEN if the data was complex enough. But if the data set is small, writing a formula sometimes seems like an overly complicated answer to a simple problem (why not just retype?).
Now Flash Fill is stepping in to help you handle this problem. If you give it a series of data (column orientation only) and an example of the pattern you want to extract, it will extract the data for you.
Flash Fill captures the first names only from the adjacent column
You can see once the second name is typed in the column adjacent to the list of full names, Flash Fill is able to see the pattern and offer all the first names in the list. Pressing enter autocompletes the action and the names are filled in. To do this, there can not be more than two blank columns between the source data and the resulting column. You can use the Ctrl + e shortcut to start flash fill.
Note the Flash Fill Icon displaying after the Ctrl + e shortcut was used.
You can click the Flash Fill icon to display the menu, accepting the suggestions will have all the names autocomplete.
The Flash Fill Menu
Here is an even trickier scenario, in the list above some names have two middle initials. Using the “default” flash fill means only the second initial will display in those names. However if I return to any of the names on the list (with two initials) and correct the example to two initials, all of the two initials examples will be extracted.
Flash Fill double initial example
I find that seriously impressive.
I can split data in a cell into multiple columns and I can also use Flash Fill to join multiple columns of data together.
Joining separate columns using Flash Fill
The same technique used above. Note that I’ve been able to add commas and periods to the text as well.
Using Flash Fill to apply formatting
In the same way, I can use Flash Fill to apply formatting, in this case putting a space between the first and second part of a postal code. You can also use it to format telephone numbers and date information.
I was (and still am) excited to share Flash Fill with my favourite clients. If you are interested in becoming one of my clients, drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
Here’s a quick keyboard tip, instead of copying and pasting the same information in multiple cells (too many steps!), try the following.
Pre selecting the cells you want to enter data in.
Enter the data – BUT instead use the Ctrl + Enter keyboard shortcut to confirm the data. This will duplicate your data entry to every cell you have selected.
The toughest part of this shortcut is remembering to use it!
In a previous post I showed how I entered a column of repeating dates when building my Social Media spreadsheet. The next thing I like to do, is colour code those dates so that I can see at a glance when the weekend dates are. For this I use the WEEKDAY function in Excel.
Weekday Function Example
Point the WEEKDAY function at a date and it will return a number from 1 thru 7 indicating what day of the week the date is. In this case the formula reads =weekday(A2,2)
The 2 in the above formula is the return type, and here indicates that the week starts on Monday. This means that Saturday and Sunday will return values of 6 & 7.
This is perfect for using with conditional formatting.
If I plug the following formula into the conditional formatting dialog box
=(WEEKDAY(A2,2))>5
I am testing for values above 5, namely the weekend. So I can use this to put a colour fill in those dates so that they stand out.
Weekday function with Conditional Formatting
Obviously, the Results column isn’t needed because the formula is actually residing in the Edit Formatting Rule dialog box.
This is the second post discussing using Conditional formatting with a Social Media spreadsheet. Check out this previous post for another example of using conditional formatting.
This post is originally from 2016. If you want help with the newest and classic features in Excel drop me a line at catharine@mytechgenie.ca
