Five Funny Excel Tricks

Excel is a complete package of functions and tricks, making it the most used spreadsheet worldwide. However, while some functions of Excel are most widely used, some remain just funny tricks used less frequently. Here are five funny Excel tricks that you can use either for work or just for fun.

Five Funny Excel Tricks

• Find the total working days between two dates, including holidays

For an employee, work becomes more fun when they know that on so and so dates he could rest as it is a holiday! Thus, many employees and even children going to school are interested in calculating the total number of working days, excluding the holidays. For this, we have a simple function in Excel, i.e., NETWORKDAYS. The syntax is =Networkdays(start_date,end_date,[holidays]), and by mentioning the holidays and the start/end dates, you can find out how many days you need to work more.

• Restricting input with data validation function

To have specific data with predefined restrictions, we can use data validation. For example, let us suppose you are collecting data for a survey report, and you want the respondents to type in the age between 18 to 40 years, and anyone entering the age below or above the set bar needs to be rejected. Then, all you need to do is, go to Data > Data validation> Settings and choose the criteria as per your requirement. You can even prompt a message as a warning, like, Kindly enter your age if you are in the age gap of 18 to 40 yrs.

• Transpose Data from a Row to a Column

We often have a particular data set whose visibility becomes an issue due to more rows or other factors. For such data, you can use the transpose function of Excel, which converts the rows to columns and columns to rows making the data display better. All you have to do is, select the data > CTRL+C> Home > Paste > Transpose. Now you will observe that all your data, in rows, have been shifted automatically into columns.

• Input values starting with 000

Try typing in a number in Excel starting with 0 or 00, say 00234. Excel will automatically remove the zeros and put just the number as the output, i.e., 234. Such zeroes at the beginning of a number are often required while setting codes or unique IDs. What you can do to fix is put a quote mark [ ‘ ] in front of the numbers to make the 00 appear.

• Add more than 1 row or column

To add more than 1 column, select the number of rows you want to add, right-click, and insert. This will automatically add the number of rows that you selected. For example, say you selected three rows before inserting, which will lead to adding the three new rows. And so on.

Excel can be fun at times, like these funny tricks. Try using these fun tricks in Excel, and let us know which trick you felt was the most fun in the comment section.