This page provides some hints for working effectively with Excel.

• Slow down! Pressing lots of buttons as you try to recover will often just get you into more trouble.  So will repeating your last mistake.  Try to take your hands off the mouse and the keyboard, and think about what's gone wrong.

• Type any totals you know.  You'll learn how to calculate totals automatically.  But sometimes it's easier to check totals than every individual entry.  So use any information your sources have given you as an easy check on your data entry.

• Type short titles directly above your data.  Keeping your titles short means you never have to widen a column just to find out what it is.  Keeping titles in the cell directly above the data means Excel will recognize them as titles in later work:

• Make numbers easier to read.  You can format numbers in literally dozens of ways.  Two of the most common are: Comma Format, and Currency Format.  Excel provides buttons for you to use:

Comma (the symbol) puts commas in between the thousands, making pure numbers easier to see.  It often also adds two decimal points.  Get rid of them by selecting the cells with the extra decimal points, and press the button with an arrow pointing to on .0 above.  The same approach works with the dollar (the $ symbol).

• Having trouble with the mouse?  Use the keyboard.  Some people find all this clicking annoying, difficult or just plain slow.  Get to know keyboard shortcuts instead.  We don't have room to go through all of them, but go into Excel's Help system, and in the Index look for "Keyboard shortcuts."