If you send Excel spreadsheet files to others, and want to insure that certain columns stay hidden you must use password protection on the file.

Before you password the file, first highlight all the cells you want people to be able to change and select "Format">"Cells" from the drop down menu. In the "Format Cells" dialog box select the "protection" tab and un-check the "locked" checkbox. You may have to do this several times if the cells in your spread sheet are not contiguous. Be sure that all the cells in the columns you want to hide have the "locked" option checked.

Then hide the columns you don't want the person to see and select "Tools">"Protection">"Protect Sheet". Enter a password (don't forget the password since it CAN NOT be recovered) and click OK.

Now when you send the spreadsheet, the person can only make changes to the sections you allowed them to and they can not "un-hide" the hidden columns.

Version 4.x, 95 Here's an Excel function you may not have seen. It's called Proper and its job is to render text with initial capitals.

Why would you need to use Proper? Well, if you purchase mailing lists, you know that many of them come in all caps. This is a poor stylistic choice for mailing labels, or embedded in a letter.

This is where Proper comes in. Of course, its most efficient use is in a macro, but you can check it out without writing a macro. Press the Caps Lock key and type something into cell A1. Try something like THIS IS ALL CAPS  Next, go to cell A2 and enter: =Proper (A1) and you'll get: This Is All Caps.

Proper deals with any text, uppercase, lowercase, or mixed. Whatever you apply it to will come out with the initial character of each word capitalized.

Sometimes it's not easy to guess how many pages an Excel worksheet will require to print. To see how it's going to look, choose "File">"Print preview" from the drop down menu. If the sheet will require more than one page, Print Preview will tell you.

If your worksheet isn't much over a single page, you can choose "File">"Page Setup" and click on the Page tab. Select the "Fit To" check box and tell Excel to make it all fit on one page. Click on OK to close the dialog box and record your changes. You can see how it will look by checking Print Preview again.

Note: This is often a valid selection if the worksheet isn't much over one page. If it is larger, then the reduction may make the printout difficult to read.

To create a series of dates in Excel, enter the starting date in the first cell. Select and highlight all the contiguous cells in which you want a date to appear (Row or Column) then from the top pull down menu choose Edit>Fill> Series. This will open the Series dialog box. Here, choose "Date Unit" and the type of date you want to use (Day, Weekday, Month, or Year.) Then select the "Step value" and Click OK.

Note: The Step value is the value added to each date in succession. For example if you selected a step value of 2 with a starting date of 12/25/99 the next date filled in would be 12/27/99, 12/29/99...etc.

If you'd like to insert the date into a cell or the formula bar, use the key combination of [CTRL]+[;] (semicolon.) To insert the current time into a cell or the formula bar, use [CTRL]+[:] (colon.) The colon is a shifted character, so you actually press [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[:].

Version 4.x, 95
If you'd like to know how many days there are between two dates open Excel and in one of the cells type:

="03/17/98" - "01/15/98" ' or today's date - 

Excel will return the number of days (61) between the two dates.
You can always find out how many days there are until Christmas. Just Enter:

="12/25/98" - "01/15/98"

and you'll get 344 days. The trick here is to remember to use the quotes. If you don't use quotes, you'll get some very strange results.

Version 4.x, 95 You can do more with Excel's date formatting than you might think. Suppose you'd like a particular cell to show only the month and the day. Click the cell (to select it) then choose Format, Cells and select Custom. Double-click the entry that's in Type and press Delete to get rid of it. Now, under Type enter:

mmmm dd

and then click OK. Let's say the date is 1/25/98. The cell will display January 25.

Suppose now that you'd like to show the day of the week, the month, and the day (numerical.) Choose Format, Cells and select Custom again. This time, type:

dddd, mmmm dd

to produce a display of Sunday, January 25. Click OK to close the dialog box and record the changes. If you want to add the year, go back to the Format Cells dialog box and type:

dddd, mmmm dd, yyy

Now click OK. This time, the cell will display Sunday, January 25,1998.

If you want to fill an Excel range with the same value or formula, first select the range, then press the [CTRL] key and simultaneously click on the first cell. Enter the value or formula in that cell, then hold down [CTRL] key and press [ENTER]. Excel will fill in the entire range.

You can enter fractions into an Excel cell and use them in your calculations. The only problem is that you have to be careful about how you enter fractions. For example, if you enter

5/6

and press Enter, Excel will think you're entering a date and convert the number to the current date format. So, 5/6 becomes something like 6-May.

To get around this problem, make a habit of entering fractions in the form zero, space, the fraction. It should look like this:

0 5/6

Now Excel knows you want to enter a fraction and will deal with the number correctly.

When you're dealing with a large worksheet, you may have trouble finding all the formulas. All you see in the worksheet are the results. You can show the formulas in a worksheet by holding down [Ctrl] key and pressing the Tilde key (~.) This is the key to the left of the 1 key.

When you press [Ctrl]+[Tilde], Excel will display all the formulas in the worksheet. To get back to normal view, press [Ctrl]+[Tilde] again.

If you want to move to a new sheet in Excel, press [Ctrl]+[Page Down]. To move to a previous sheet, press [Ctrl]+[Page Up]. To get to the very last data cell in your worksheet, press [Ctrl]+[End]. [Ctrl]+[Home] will take you to cell A1.