Whether you're looking to boost your spreadsheet efficiency, elevate your data analysis capabilities, or improve your career prospects, learning new tricks in Microsoft Excel is sure to help you along the way. So, add these six Excel hacks to your toolkit today.

For longer than I care to remember, I've written Excel formulas, dragged them down hundreds of rows, copied calculations across columns, and built running totals one cell at a time. This works, but I always find I'm doing too much work, especially when some of those jobs can be handled by a single formula sitting in a single cell.

I've spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time in Excel, so I've had plenty of opportunities to find out which habits make my life easier—and which ones come back to haunt me later. Over the years, I've gradually ditched a handful of things that seemed harmless at the time but made my spreadsheets harder to sort, filter, update, or understand. Here are five things I stopped doing in Excel, and why my spreadsheets have become much more reliable as a result.

Sometimes the best Excel projects start with something the program can't do out of the box. Surprisingly, Excel doesn't have a built-in timeline chart. So I experimented with a regular line chart, and 10 minutes later, I had a series of events mapped out in a dynamic timeline. Want to give it a try this weekend? Here's what I did.

I'm probably guilty of making Excel spreadsheets more complicated than they need to be, but I have one rule I keep coming back to: if I'm going to build a PivotTable, I want to actually enjoy using it. The basic summary is useful, but a few small additions can make a surprisingly big difference.

I have a soft spot for old software Easter eggs, especially the ones that make you wonder what developers were doing when nobody was looking. Excel 97 has one of my favorites: a secret 3D flight simulator hidden inside a spreadsheet. And, yes, I went looking for a way to play it.

Spreadsheets are difficult to avoid, and a lot of what you have to do with them is pretty tedious: endless formatting, cleaning up data, and other repetitive tasks. And, worse yet, you often can't just throw AI at the problem—spreadsheets can contain information that you can't upload to Claude or ChatGPT because it is confidential, or even legally privileged.

I have an annoying habit in Excel. Whenever I want to switch to another worksheet, I instinctively press Alt+Tab. I know that's not what the shortcut does, but years of using it to jump between apps have made the habit almost impossible to break. So I found a way to make it work.

I often open an Excel spreadsheet and wonder what has changed since the last time I used it. Sometimes I've made the changes myself and simply forgotten what I did, and other times, someone else has edited the workbook. Either way, figuring out what happened can mean digging through the spreadsheet's history.

Excel has more than 500 built-in functions, but if you asked me which ones I use most often, I wouldn't need very long to answer. After nearly two decades of using Excel professionally, there's a small group I keep reaching for whenever I'm building or fixing a spreadsheet. Some have been around for years, while others are relatively new to modern Excel.

Whether you're starting a new business venture and need Microsoft Office's help or you just want to get better organized in your personal life, it's a good time to take advantage of this deal.

The post Get Lifetime Access to Microsoft Office 2021 for Just $30 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Whether you're starting a new business venture and need Microsoft Office's help or you just want to get better organized in your personal life, it's a good time to take advantage of this deal.

The post Get Lifetime Access to Microsoft Office 2021 for Just $30 appeared first on TechRepublic.