5 time-saving Excel tips to put to the test this weekend (July 24-26)

A few minutes spent trying the right Excel tools this weekend could save you hours in the weeks ahead. These five built-in features tackle common frustrations like scrolling through huge workbooks, cleaning up pasted data, and finding problem cells, so you can put them straight to use on Monday morning.

Use the Name Box to navigate large workbooks

Stop scrolling through thousands of rows and columns

Most people using Excel treat the Name Box at the top left of the grid solely as a simple status indicator. In reality, it doubles as a fast-path navigation bar that transports you across large workbooks.

Instead of dragging a tiny scrollbar thumbnail past row 50,000—and inevitably overshooting your target—you can jump straight to the target cell. It’s also a major time-saver when you need to select hundreds of rows or jump between important areas of your workbook—including different worksheets—using named ranges.

1. Click inside the Name Box to the left of the formula bar.
2. Type your target cell coordinate, such as A650, and press Enter.
3. Select an entire region by typing a range reference like D2:J100 and pressing Enter.
4. Click the drop-down arrow to jump straight to any existing table or named range.

Turn raw numbers into answers faster

Building summary views and visual reports from scratch takes time and patience you might not have. The built-in Analyze Data feature scans your active sheet and generates summaries and visualizations. This tool is especially valuable when you inherit an unfamiliar spreadsheet with thousands of rows and need to spot trends fast.

1. Open your worksheet and click anywhere inside your data table.
2. Depending on your version of Excel, go to the Home tab and click Analyze Data on the far-right side of the ribbon.
3. Review the generated summaries, PivotTables, and charts.
4. Click the Insert button to add a suggested table or chart to your worksheet.

OS

Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android

Free trial

1 month

Microsoft 365 includes access to Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on up to five devices, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and more.

Use Ctrl+Shift+V to paste values without unwanted formatting

Pasting data into Excel using the standard Ctrl+V shortcut often pulls in mismatched fonts, weird background colors, and broken formatting. But Ctrl+Shift+V allows you to paste only the underlying values, so you don’t need to waste time reformatting the data.

This shortcut fixes daily annoyances like pasting data from a web page without bringing along grey background boxes, pulling lists out of emails without breaking your table’s font styles, or copying values from another workbook without bringing across unwanted calculations.

To see the difference, try pasting the same data twice: once normally, and once using the values-only shortcut:

1. Select and copy your source text or data using Ctrl+C.
2. Click your destination cell in your Excel worksheet.
3. First, press Ctrl+V to see how the data would normally paste into Excel. In my example, the names arrive in a smaller font, wrap onto two lines, and include extra spacing that I don’t want in my worksheet.
4. Now, after pressing Ctrl+Z to undo the paste, press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste only the values and keep your worksheet’s existing formatting.

Use Go To Special to find problem cells across your sheet

Stop manually hunting through thousands of cells

Searching through a large worksheet for formulas, hard-coded values, or other specific cell types can take far longer than it should. Go To Special instantly finds and selects those cells across your entire spreadsheet, turning a slow manual review into a quick audit.

Before opening Go To Special, select the area you want Excel to check. Click a single cell to search the whole worksheet, or highlight a specific range if you only want to search part of your data. Then:

1. Press F5, or go to Home > Find & Select > Go To Special.
2. If you pressed F5, click Special at the bottom of the pop-up window.
3. Choose the specific category you want to isolate, such as Formulas, Constants, or cells containing data validation.

When you click OK, every matching cell on your sheet or within your selected range is simultaneously selected. You can then apply the same formatting to all of them, press Enter to move through each selected cell one by one, or enter a value once and press Ctrl+Enter to fill every selected cell at the same time.

Open a new window to view two parts of the same file

Compare distant sheets without constantly scrolling back and forth

Cross-checking numbers between separate tabs or far-off rows takes time and often leads to errors. Opening a second window of your active file using the New Window feature lets you view two separate areas at the same time without opening separate copies of the workbook.

This setup transforms tasks like comparing a summary sheet against the raw data behind it. You can keep your primary summary tab visible while scrolling, filtering, or checking formula inputs across raw data sheets in the second window.

1. In the workbook you need to review, open the View tab.
2. Click New Window to launch a synchronized view of your document.
3. After opening the second window, go back to the View tab, click Arrange All, and choose the layout that works best for your workflow:
   1. Tiled arranges all open workbook windows across your screen automatically.
   2. Horizontal stacks the windows one above the other.
   3. Vertical places the windows side by side, which is usually best for comparing data.
   4. Cascade layers the windows so you can quickly switch between them.
4. When you edit your data in one window, your changes will update automatically across every open view.
5. When you’re finished, close any extra windows. The remaining window will continue as your normal workbook view.

Keep optimizing your Excel workflow

Once you’ve put these time-saving Excel tips to the test, continue exploring with last weekend’s roundup of little-known Excel features you might not have discovered yet. Together, these tools can help you spend less time searching through spreadsheets and more time getting things done with Excel’s built-in features.