Greg Harvey

In Microsoft Excel, you can use the keyboard to select cells and access hot key sequences that can greatly speed up the process of selecting program commands. Excel also makes it easy to share workbooks saved on your OneDrive and sort multiple fields in a table.Hot keys for the Excel file menu commandsYou can activate the Excel hot keys by pressing the Alt key before you press the various sequences of mnemonic letters.

Excel 2016 for Office 365 subscribers on Windows and Mac now supports a new XLOOKUP function, touted as a considerably simpler and more versatile replacement for the very popular (yet oft maligned) vertical lookup function, VLOOKUP (don’t know what the X in XLOOKUP stands for; eXtensive, perhaps?).For those of you not yet familiar with VLOOKUP (deemed the third most-used function right after SUM and AVERAGE), this function searches vertically by row in the leftmost column of a designated lookup table from top to bottom until it finds a value in a lookup column designated by an offset number that matches or exceeds the one your looking up.

Microsoft has made significant changes to Excel 2016's annotation features. What used to be known as comments used like electronic Post it stickies for attaching reminders to cells of the worksheet are now called notes and comments now known as Threaded Comments function as a means for conducting a conversation with coworkers and clients with whom you have shared the Excel file in real time using Office 365.

By password-protecting your Excel workbook, you can prevent unauthorized users from opening the workbook and/or editing the workbook. You set a password for opening the Excel workbook file when you’re dealing with a spreadsheet whose data is of a sufficiently sensitive nature that only a certain group of people in the company should have access to it (such as spreadsheets dealing with personal information and salaries).

Although Excel’s Data Table and Goal Seek commands work just fine for simple problems that require determining the direct relationship between the inputs and results in a formula, you need to use the Solver add-in when dealing with more complex problems. For example, use the Solver to find the best solution when you need to change multiple input values in your Excel model and you need to impose constraints on these values and/or the output value.

The Forecast Sheet feature in Excel 2019 makes it super easy to turn a worksheet containing historical financial data into a remarkable visual forecast worksheet. All you do is open the Excel worksheet with your historical data, position the cell cursor in one of its cells, and then click the Forecast Sheet button on the Data Tab of the Ribbon (Alt+AFC).

3D Map is the new name of an exciting visual analysis feature that’s available in Excel 2019, formerly known as Power Map in Excel 2016. 3D Map enables you to use geographical, financial, and other types of data along with date and time fields in your Excel data model to create animated 3-D map tours.To create a new animation for the first tour in 3D Map, you follow these general steps in Excel 2019: Open the worksheet that contains the data for which you want to create the new Power Map animation.