Excel Training Boise

Thanks to MissingManuals for posting this on YouTube.

Jared Hawk is a professional Excel Seminar Trainer and Consultant in Boise, Idaho. He is also a contributing author to www.masterthebusiness.com and manages a Continuing Legal Education Blawg.

Ok, one of the most searched posts on this blog is Can you divide an Excel cell in half? In it, I explain that you can’t.

And you still can’t.

But if you are trying to have a cell half the size of the cells around it (or a quarter of the size, or whatever you like) you can simply merge and center all of the cells around the smaller cell. So if you wanted cells B1 and B2 to be half the size of A1 and C1, you would merge and center A1 with A2, and C1 with C2, leaving B1 and B2 seemingly half-sized cells.

The only other option is to place a text-box or image of some sort in the cell so it seems to divide it, but you lose functionality that way.

There is a way to divide the contents of an Excel cell, however.

Jared Hawk is a professional Excel Seminar Trainer and Consultant in Boise, Idaho. He is also a contributing author to www.masterthebusiness.com and to IdahoCLE.com.

Thanks to Ralph Phillips for creating this video and posting it on Youtube.

Jared Hawk is a professional Microsoft Excel Webinar Trainer and Consultant in Boise, Idaho. He is also a contributing author to www.masterthebusiness.com.

I went to an Excel seminar from a national company yesterday- one without any computers to practice on. They all give the same reasons for not using computers- “Computers will just slow the class down”, “More material will be covered” and “You already know how to turn the computer on and hit enter.” And don’t forget to buy a book or cd from the back of the room.

My response? As someone who has taught both hands-on and hands-off Excel classes, I do not believe students will learn how to do nearly as much without a computer to practice on. What good is it to see a quick review of features if you can’t practice them to lock them into memory? In my opinion, the two real reasons companies don’t use computers are to keep costs low (for the company) and to sell books and training CDs that attendees wouldn’t necessarily need if the classes were more effective.

Jared Hawk is a professional Excel Seminar Trainer and Consultant in Boise, ID. He is also a contributing author to www.masterthebusiness.com and IdahoCLE.com

If you need to generate a time-stamp automatically in a spreadsheet (to tell when the last time a macro was run, for example) and you don’t know VBA or are intimidated by it, you can use the macro recorder. Keep in mind that if you use the standard functions:

=today() or =now()

as you record, they will be accurate- temporarily, but the formulas will update as the time changes, giving the wrong time stamps. 

A solution is simple: creat a macro that copies the date/time and then use paste special to paste the value only. The pasted value will not update.

Jared Hawk is a professional Microsoft Excel Seminar Trainer and Consultant in Boise, ID. He is also a contributing author to www.masterthebusiness.com and idahocle.com