Excel 2010 cheat sheet

Six tips for working with Excel 2010

With the introduction of the Ribbon in 2007, many familiar ways of interacting with Excel became hard to find while powerful new tools cropped up. These six tips can help you get the most out of the new interface and features and locate your old favorites.

Hide the Ribbon

Ribbon taking up too much screen space? You can temporarily turn it off. Doing this will get you back plenty of screen real estate, as you can see in the screenshot below.

To hide the Ribbon, you can either press Ctrl-F1 (and press Ctrl-F1 again to make the Ribbon reappear) or just right-click anywhere in the Ribbon and select "Minimize the Ribbon."

The Ribbon will still be available when you want it -- all you need to do is click on the appropriate tab (Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc.) and it appears. It then discreetly goes away when you are no longer using it.

Add commands to the Quick Access toolbar

By letting you customize the Ribbon, Excel 2010 has gotten a lot more flexible than Excel 2007. But it can still be helpful to customize the Quick Access toolbar for one-click access to your most frequently used commands, no matter which Ribbon tab is showing.

As mentioned earlier in the story, you can do this via Backstage's Options screen, but a quicker way is to click the small down arrow to the right on the Quick Access toolbar and choose More Commands.

From the left-hand side of the screen that appears, choose commands that you want to add to the toolbar and click Add. You can change the order in which the buttons appear on the toolbar by highlighting a button on the right side of the screen and using the up and down arrows to move it.

The list of commands you see on the left may seem somewhat limited at first. That's because Excel is showing you only the most popular commands. Click the drop-down menu under "Choose commands from" at the top of the screen, and you'll see other lists of commands -- All Commands, Home Tab and so on. Select any option, and there will be plenty of commands you can add.

Finally, there's an even easier way to add a command. Right-click any object on the Ribbon and choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar." You can add not only individual commands in this way, but also entire groups -- for example, the Sparklines group.

Share Slicers across PivotTables

Here's a nifty Slicer trick: You can tie the same Slicer to multiple PivotTables so that, for example, you could select the West region in a Slicer and all connected PivotTables would filter their respective data on the same field. You can even make this work when the PivotTables are on different workbooks. Here's how to do it:

1. Create your first PivotTable on a workbook and define a Slicer: Click anywhere inside the PivotTable. Excel adds a PivotTable Tools tab to the Ribbon. Choose the Options subtab, and in the Ribbon that appears, click on the Insert Slicer icon (do not click the down-pointing arrow that reads "Insert Slicer" -- we'll cover that option in a moment).

2. Choose the field you want to filter from the list of fields in your PivotTable, then choose OK. Repeat for each Slicer you want to create.

3. Create another PivotTable on the same worksheet. This PivotTable must have a field with the same name as the field in the first PivotTable for which you created the Slicer in Step 2. Click anywhere within this second PivotTable, then once again choose the Options subtab from the PivotTable Tools tab. This time, however, choose the down-pointing arrow that reads "Insert Slicer" and choose "Slicer Connections..."

4. Excel displays a list of Slicers from the first PivotTable. Check the boxes for the Slicers you want to apply to your second PivotTable and choose OK. Check to see that the Slicer filters data in both PivotTables simultaneously.

5. Copy and paste your second PivotTable to a new worksheet. The connection to the original Slicer is still intact. You can now delete the second PivotTable from the original worksheet.

Note: Before moving on to Step 5, be sure to connect all the Slicers you want to work with your second PivotTable in Step 4. If you decide that you want to add another Slicer after you've already moved the second PivotTable to another worksheet, you'll have to go back to Step 3 and start again on the original worksheet.

Find your old friends

If you've been using Excel 2007, you've probably found most of the features and functions you used in earlier versions of Excel. But if you're upgrading directly to Excel 2010 from Excel 2003 or earlier, you may have a harder time locating many of your favorite commands.

Use our for an extensive list of where to find your old friends in the newest version of Excel. To save you more time, we've also included keyboard shortcuts for all these commands.

Use macros

As in Excel 2007, macros -- ingenious shortcuts you can create for performing repetitive tasks -- are hard to find in Excel 2010. But they're there: If you display the Developer tab, you'll find the macro tools in all their glory in the Code group. In fact, they're easier to reach than they were in earlier versions of Excel.

You'll find everything you want in the Code group. Record a macro by clicking the Record Macro button, manage your macros by clicking the Macros button, and configure security for a macro by clicking the Macro Security button.

(Bonus bug fix: Unlike in Excel 2007, recording a macro when formatting a chart in Excel 2010 will now actually produce macro code.)

Use keyboard shortcuts

If you've been using keyboard shortcuts in Excel 2007, Excel 2003 or earlier versions, take heart -- most of the same ones work in Excel 2010. Any shortcuts that use the Ctrl key, such as Ctrl-C for copying to the clipboard and Ctrl-V for pasting, still work. And most of the old Alt-key shortcuts work as well, although not every one of them. See the table at the bottom of the page for the most useful shortcuts in Excel.

You can also use a clever set of keyboard shortcuts for working with the Ribbon. (These are unchanged from Excel 2007.) Press the Alt key, and then a tiny letter or number icon will appear on the menu for each tab -- for example, the letter H for the Home tab. Now press that letter on your keyboard, and you'll display that tab or menu item. When the tab appears, there will be letters and numbers for most options on the tab as well.

Once you've started to learn these shortcuts, you'll naturally begin using key combinations. So instead of pressing Alt then H to display the home tab, you can press Alt-H together.

The screenshot above shows the most useful Alt key combinations in Excel 2010. For more nifty keyboard shortcuts, see the table below. And even more shortcuts are listed on Microsoft's Office 2010 site.

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Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).
Rich Ericson is a Northwest-based technology writer and the reviews editor of The Office Letter, a site devoted to tips for Microsoft Office.