I write about Excel shortcuts a lot, and I've picked up plenty over the years. Some are useful only in very specific situations. Others become so familiar that I don't even think about pressing them anymore. Since Microsoft introduced Ctrl+Shift+V to Excel in 2022, it's become one of those shortcuts for me.

I've used Excel for long enough to know that it isn't the first tool I'd reach for when I want to draw a picture, plan a room, or design a craft project. But a blank worksheet has helped me get creative, have a bit of fun, and sometimes even solve a problem faster than I could with a piece of paper or a dedicated app. Once you stop thinking of Excel as just somewhere to enter data, its grid becomes a surprisingly useful playground.

When you set up a brand-new Windows PC, you probably want to get through the setup screens as quickly as possible so you can start using your shiny new computer. That makes it easy to click through Microsoft's privacy options without paying much attention to what you've actually enabled. One of those settings allows Microsoft to collect samples of what you type or write.

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.

The web looks very different from when I first started using it. Browsers have changed, websites have become more complex, and I've picked up countless keyboard shortcuts along the way. Most have come and gone from my daily routine, but there's one I still turn to pretty much every day: Ctrl+Shift+D.

I'm one of those people who presses Alt+Tab hundreds of times a day to bounce between the many windows I have open. The problem is that Windows' built-in switcher starts to get awkward when I have lots of windows open, and aside from choosing how many thumbnails to display, there's not much room for customization.

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.

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.

Every morning, I open the same apps and then spend the next few minutes dragging, resizing, and rearranging them across my two monitors. By the afternoon, everything has shifted again. I was getting tired of rebuilding the same desktop layouts, so I went looking for a better way. Then I found an easy-to-use PowerToys tool: Workspaces.