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I know there will probably only be one or two of you out there who actually appreciate this, but I am going to start posting some tips and tricks I have learned in various tools.  As I spend a great deal of my waking hours working with Microsoft Excel (and other applications), I thought perhaps I should share some insights from a road-tested office warrior.  I am by no means an expert, but have been known to come up with some, uh, interesting ways of presenting data.  We're going to start out with some of the very basics of things to do in Excel, and over time we'll step up the complexity a notch or two.  When you work in Excel for long periods of time, you quickly become very tired of redundant tasks, or things that just plain and simple take too long.  Such as scrolling.

First things first, though.  The biggest favor you are going to do for yourself if you regularly work with Excel is to forget about your mouse and get friendly with the keyboard.  Not too friendly, though, I don't really condone that type of behavior in the office.  You might ask, "Why should I stop using my mouse?  It's so cute and will go absolutely anywhere on my screen!".  Well, the response to that is fairly simple, "A mouse is not generally considered to be a very intelligent creature, and they scare elephants.  Do you want to scare elephants? Do you?"  If we were to have fight night 2008, Keyboard vs Mouse, Keyboard would certainly walk away the winner 97.23% of the time.  And we're not talking some sissy little wrestling grapple hold here, but a full knockdown drag-out UFC fight where there is kicking, biting, scratching and bone-crushing elbows to the face brawl. Besides, a mouse only has between 1 and 5 buttons, where as a typical keyboard has 104.  I'll let you do the math.

Seriously, the office workplace would be so much more productive in general if people forgot they had a mouse and used their keyboard to the greatest extent possible.  Give it a try.  Disconnect your mouse for a week¹, study some keyboard shortcuts, and see how much more you get done (the one downfall is internet browsers, sites with lots of links are not conducive to using the keyboard, and I actually encourage you to use the mouse if you'll be surfing the web). 

To begin with, the quickest time savers when it comes to keyboard shortcuts deal with navigation within the worksheet/workbook.  I'll list just a couple of them here, and provide a few links to other sites that go into much more detail and provide more comprehensive listings.  But this is a good start at any rate.  The first few alone will save a lot of time that was previously spent on scrolling.

I know that was a very short list, but you will be amazed at what a difference using just a few of these will make over time.  Here are some additional resources:

Microsoft's Listing of Excel Shortcuts

CPearson Matrix of Shortcuts

Study them.  Memorize it.  Use it.  Love it.  Save time!

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit I have never gone a full week without a mouse.  A few hours here and there, but nothing more.  Call me a hypocrite if you want.

I was just putting the finishing touches on a long post, and clicked a button that I shouldn't have and lost everything.

Nuts.  I'm going to try to recreate it, but talk about frustrating.

Unfortunately our a/c went out yesterday.  It was a sticky 88.6 degrees upstairs and just slightly cooler downstairs.  If I was back in Sacramento I could at least look forward to a comfortable night with the windows open to a nice, cool Delta breeze.  But I'm in muggy old Virginia.  There was no breeze until about 6:30 am when a storm came through and forced us to close our portals to the warm, night air.  At 4:00 am we were down to 86.6 degrees and right now we are at what (compared to the misery of last night) feels like a very comfortable 84.6 degrees.

Alright, here I am complaining about poor me but really I was more concerned about our little dude.  Baby's don't thermoregulate well and they say overheating is a risk factor for SIDS.  So I was freaked out last night and stayed up till 1am watching him breathe and feeling his head, arms, legs and tummy to make sure he wasn't becoming too hot and sweaty.  It was of course one of the few nights where he fell right asleep after his pm feeding at a very reasonable 10:30. So my potential five hours of sleep turned into two and a half.  I'm such a moron.

Derek is calling around this morning to see how soon we can get anyone out here to take a look.  I'm not too expectant but am hoping hard that someone can come today.  I'm also hoping it's not too damaging to the old pocketbook.