TIPS for CLICKS: Custom Lists

Using Excel Custom Lists

What are Custom Lists used for? They are used mainly for SORTING or FILLING any regular Excel lists and tables in a specific user-defined order. Using the lists may save you a lot of time when frequent sorting or filling your lists is needed when working with Excel data.

Excel provides couple of built-in lists by default, as you can see below: 

 

How you can use them? Here is the way (if you haven't used them never before):

• in your selected cell type in any entry from the custom list, e.g. Jan, or Mon, etc.
  
• click on the small box at the bottom right corner and drag it any way you want to - down, up, right, left - to populate any number of cells, in rows or columns, with the list items.

There are also many "hidden" custom-like lists you can built and use easily as needed. Below are some examples of such lists that Excel accepts and readily auto fills for you:

TIPS for CLICKS: Formatting / Editing / Moving around in a Workbook

Excel is equipped with hundreds of formatting and editing tools, key codes and alternative handling of data. Some of them are worth more useful than others. The following list presents some of the most helpful and time saving tips for frequent users.

Format Painter > If you double-click the Painter in the ribbon you can copy formatting of your selection (cell, range) repeatedly or singularly into multiple disparate cells or ranges. Click Format Painter once to quit it, if necessary.

Multiple lines in a cell > Two or more lines can be inserted into a cell by pressing ALT+ENTER after entering some value in the original line. It's just another way of wrapping text in a cell.

Borders >  If you select (in Home tab) Borders>More Borders..., you can select and add diagonal lines in active cell or range of cells to divide them e.g. in two parts. Then, you can add some value/text into the cell and press ALT+ENTER to type another value/text in the second line. Alignment of the entries can be fixed using spacebar, if needed. Example: