For many working in legal departments, using Microsoft Excel is a daily necessity, from producing invoices to taking stock of how much stationery is in the storeroom. As with most essential office software, there are many things you can do to make daily use more easy and pleasurable. Here are five useful tips:

Entering Text over Several Lines

If you have a lot of text to enter into a cell and you want it to appear, hit ALT+ENTER and your cursor will be taken to a new line.

Navigating Worksheets with Shortcut Keys

Shortcut keys are always good to know. If you have a lot of worksheets, you can navigate them by pressing CTRL+PAGE DOWN to move right and CTRL+PAGE UP to move left.

Hiding Data in Printouts

When it comes to printing, you may want some data left out of the spreadsheet. To do this, you simply select the columns and/or rows you wish to hide, right click and select ‘Hide’. Now you can print your document. Once you have printed your spreadsheet, you can unhide the columns by right-clicking a row or column border and selecting ‘Unhide’.

Changing Your Sheet Names and Colours

The default sheet names like ‘Sheet1’ and ‘Sheet2’ are not very helpful. You can change sheet names by right-clicking on a sheet’s tab and selecting ‘Rename’; to change the colour, you right-click and select ‘Tab Colour’. Changing colours is useful if you have many sheets that serve different purposes and you want to be able to access them at a glance.

Adding a Calculator to the Toolbar

From Excel 2010 onward there is a default calculator, but you have to enable it. Go to Quick Access toolbar options and click ‘More Commands’. In the ‘Excel Options’ dialog, go to Choose commands and click the drop-down button to select All Commands. Scroll down to the Calculator command and click ‘Add’. You will now see the calculator in your Quick Access toolbar.”