As a service to our clients and students, we want to provide a blog especially useful to the everyday Excel user … those folks to whom Excel is just a tool to help them do the rest of their job. Many Excel blogs are dedicated to advanced Excel topics like programming VBA macros and the internal quirks of the various Excel versions; topics that are of interest almost exclusively to so-called power users and our subculture of Excel consultants. For new or casual users, Excel’s Graphical User Interface (the so-called GUI [pronounced “gooey”] which is made up of all those icons and labels hiding on ribbons, menus and popups) is often a mysterious and frustrating maze you must successfully navigate, first, to edit the contents of the forest of cells, next, format their appearance and then, finally, print the desired results so you have a good-looking, useful document to show for your efforts.
Don’t let that frustration get in the way of increasing your Excel-related job skills. When you know there must be an easier way to perform some task in Excel, spend a little time digging … learning to search will pay you dividends later. If you don’t find the answer in 5 or 10 minutes, ask us the question. We’ll endeavor to answer those questions quickly and directly. We want to decrease your frustration level and increase your self-confidence. In a few months you will find that the folks around you will be asking you their Excel questions and you can pay it forward.