Top 10 Excel lessons for any new graduate or student

As a graduate you will go through plenty of training, e-learning and on-the-job instruction, but some of the most useful Excel habits are rarely taught. Auditors, investment banking analysts and people in financial management all use Excel every day. These ten lessons will help in your first few years and after.

1. Remove gridlines in Excel the right way

Filling cells with white to hide the gridlines wastes time. Untick Gridlines on the View tab instead and they go in one step, as Figure 1 shows.

2. Double-click Format Painter

Double-click Format Painter to apply a format as many times as you need, not just once. It works the same way in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint.

3. Alt+= for AutoSum

Sum is probably the function you use most. Alt+= sums the numbers directly above the active cell.

4. F4 to repeat an action

Instead of adding a border, a fill or a row by hand each time, press F4 to repeat the last action.

5. Ctrl+[ and F5 then Enter to trace precedents faster

This pair shows where a number comes from. Ctrl+[ takes you to a cell’s precedents. F5 opens Go To, which remembers the cell you came from, so pressing Enter takes you straight back.

6. Align and Snap to Grid

Lining up shapes and charts by eye is fiddly. Hold Ctrl and click each one to select them all, then align them from the Align menu. Snap to Grid, in the same menu, lines a shape up with the gridlines. Holding Alt while you move or resize a shape with the mouse does the same.

7. Use cell styles

Cell styles make a workbook look more professional and keep formatting consistent. Find them on the Home tab, or press Alt+H+J.

Excel’s built-in styles are limited, but you can build your own to match your house style. Our template, to download from this page, gives you a set to start from. Excel can also open a chosen template automatically each time it starts.

8. Paste Special

Paste Special earns its place as models grow. After copying a cell, press Ctrl+Alt+V to open it, or use the Paste menu on the ribbon, as Figures 4 and 5 show.

Paste Special pastes only part of a cell, such as its format or its value. It can also apply an operation to the pasted values, such as multiplying by the copied cell, transpose a range from columns to rows and back and paste a link to the cell. That makes it easy to link inputs through a workbook.

9. Hover over Excel ribbon icons to learn shortcuts

Relying less on the mouse is one of the quickest ways to work faster in Excel. Hover over a ribbon icon and Excel often shows its keyboard shortcut, an easy way to learn shortcuts as you go.

10. Search for the answer

It is tempting to think every problem is new, but someone has almost certainly hit the same Excel problem and written about it. A search is one of the fastest ways to fix a spreadsheet problem.