Contextures News 20190108

Excel Quick Tips

January 8, 2019

Two quick Excel tips, and more, in this week's Excel news. Visit my Excel website for more tips, tutorials and videos, and check the index for past issues of this newsletter.

Note: For some products mentioned below, I earn a commission on sales. That helps support the free tutorials on my site.

Show Degree Symbol

If you're entering temperatures in Excel, you can format the cells to show the degree symbol:

• Select the cells that should have degree symbols
• Press Ctrl+1, to open the Format Cells window
• In the Category list, click Custom
• In the Type box, enter 0.0
• Next, press the Alt key, and on the number keypad, type: 0176
• Optional: Type a C or F, to show the measurement system
• Click OK, to apply the custom number format

There are more Custom Number Format examples on the Rounding functions page on my Contextures site. Thanks to Jim M, who asked how to add the degree symbol.

Names List

When you open an old workbook, or a file that someone else created, you might not know exactly what's in there. Here's a quick way to get a list of the defined names that are in the workbook:

• Add a blank sheet, and select a cell in that sheet
• Press F3 to open a list of the workbook's names
• Click the Paste List button, to add the names and definitions to the sheet

Learn more about Excel names on my Contextures site, and see how to create dynamic ranges with a macro (thanks to Roger Govier for that example)

Excel Articles

Here are a few Excel articles that you might find useful or interesting.

Excel Tips - Lori Kaufman show 4 tips for working with the Excel Ribbon - do you ever use that AutoHide command? The article caught my eye, because the screen shots show my Sample Data workbook. (Level - All)

Charts - Jon Peltier shows how to make a repeated Gantt chart in Excel, to track player time on ice. Can you think of other ways to use this type of chart? (Level - All)

Data Viz - Nathan Yau chose his favourite data viz projects from 2018, so take a look, to get inspiration for your own projects. (Level - All)

Also see: My Excel Products || Excel Events || Previous Issues || Weekly Humour

Who You Are

Happy New Year! For 2019, I'm following the 52 week photo challenge, on the Dogwood Photography website. There's one photo challenge each week, and the first one is "Take a picture that tells us who you are, without actually showing your face."

What would your photo show? Here's mine - a shot of the bookcase beside my desk. That's where I spend most of my time, and I certainly use Google many times during the day!

NOTE: To read this newsletter online, paste this URL into your web browser: https://www.contextures.com/newsletter/excelnews2019/20190108ctx.html
I'll also post any article updates or corrections there.

That's it for this week! If you have any comments or questions, send me an email.

Debra Dalgleish
dsdalg@ gmail.com

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