Microsoft Excel is the commonly used software for creating a table of data and creating formulas and functions to work on the data. They are also used extensively for creating graphs and charts out of the underlying stored data. The latest version of the Excel that is available as part of the office package is the Excel 2010 version.

By itself Excel is a user friendly tool. But it can be made much simpler by making use of some simple short cut steps either by using the keys ion the keyboard or through the mouse. In order to fill the subsequent cells with some content that is there in the previous cell, instead of selecting the cell and then performing the Ctrl C, Ctrl V operation, you can use the key stroke Ctrl + (single quote) to copy the content in the previous cell to the current cell. If anyone wants to edit a formula in the formula bar, they can directly use the F2 key and perform the changes.

Similarly, if you want to add multiple lines of text in to a single cell, you can go that particular cell and use the key combinations Alt and Enter to create line breaks and start typing in the next line. If you want to edit the contents of a cell without changing the formatting feature of the cell, you can select that cell, then press F2 and then press delete key in the keyboard to delete the existing content and then enter the new content.

With respect to navigating between different worksheets in a workbook, instead of scrolling across the length of the worksheet, one can right mouse click on the 4 triangle navigation buttons, which will then display a pop up of all the available worksheet names in the workbook, out of which the person can select the required one and go to that worksheet directly. If one wants to toggle between two adjacent worksheets, then that can be accomplished by using the keyboard strokes Ctrl + Page Down for going to the next sheet and Ctrl + Page Up to go to the previous sheet.

While working with a particular worksheet, if the user wants to change some settings in that particular worksheet, they can use the right mouse click on the sheet name to get all the options related to that particular sheet. One can quickly perform insertion, deletion, changing the tab color and moving or copying the sheet. If the user wants to rename a sheet, they can straightaway double click on the sheet name and change the name.

If some user wants to print or review the worksheet formulas that are available in that worksheet, the keyboard short cut Ctrl and Tilde will list all the formulas available in that worksheet. Similarly, one can also create PDF files using the export option in Excel and send the PDF file to the targeted user by invoking the mail application directly from Excel. Compatibility checker is another useful utility that will check whether the worksheet from other sources is compatible with the currently available worksheet on the system and then generate a report that will provide all the shortcomings.