Marking cells Good-Bad-Neutral

Sometimes when you are reviewing a file against a printed report, you may need to identify when cell values are correct, wrong or close.

Consider using the built-in Styles Good/Bad/Neutral on the Home ribbon tab – see below.

These can be quicker than using the usual fill colour icon.

Remember they may not be useful for colour blind readers if you are sharing with other people.

Don’t forget once applied if you want to apply the same format to another cell press the F4 function key.

Once formatted you can sort or filter by colour – see right click options below.

Adding Values to Values

Let’s say you have an input cell that someone enters multiple values into eg

=10+5+34

You may have many such cells.

Now let’s say you want to add 20 to all these cells but keep the original values that have been entered in those cells.

Paste Special to the rescue.

1. Enter 20 in a blank cell and then copy the cell
2. Select the cells you want to amend – you can hold the Ctrl key down to select  multiple cells with the mouse
3. Open the Paste Special dialog
4. Click the options Values and Add – as per image below – then click OK – done!

The resulting formula will be something like

=(10+5+34)+20


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Find and Replace Tips, Tricks and Traps
	

Find and Replace Tips, Tricks and Traps

The keyboard short for Find is Ctrl + f.

For Find & Replace it is Ctrl + h.

Tips

Always, I mean ALWAYS, select the range you are working with before you run Find and Replace.

If you have a single cell selected it will affect the whole sheet – maybe not what you want.

Leave the Dialog Open

In the old days we used to close the Find dialog. Now you can leave it open if you need to change things in multiple files or sheets. You can navigate around with the dialog left open.

When using Find if you want to select all the cells it has found, click in the bottom section of the Find dialog where the cells are listed and press Ctrl + a this will select all the cells at once.

Number Formats

Be aware that sometimes numbers won’t be found due to formatting. eg if you search for 1000 but you have used the comma format eg 1,000 then the number might not be found.

You might need to do two Finds, with and without commas.

Formulas vs Values

Click on the Options button to see these options.

The default Look in: setting for Find (unfortunately) is Formulas. See image below.

This means if a formula returns what you are looking for it won’t be found. You need to switch this Look in: setting to Values.

Increase Decimal

I found a good shortcut today to increase the decimal places.

Alt H 0

For example you might use these two shortcuts one after the other to format a range as a percentage with one decimal place.

Ctrl + Shift + %

Alt H 0