To quickly select a contiguous range, click on the first cell in the range and press SHIFT+CTRL+END. Or, for rows use SHIFT+CTRL+left/right arrow, and for columns use SHIFT+CTRL+up/down arrow. (Thanks to Roman Artemyev, who got paid for submitting this tip!)

Office XP displays a polite apology message when it crashes, and offers to send a crash report to Microsoft. Winguides.com offers guidance on permanently disabling this screen.

Enter a date into any cell, and then choose Format and Cells. Choose Custom on the Number tab. Enter mmmm into the Type field. Use mmm to abbreviate the month, or use ddd and dddd to display days of the week.

Use the following custom number format #,###, (4 number signs, two commas) to display 15,000,000 as 15,000 (just be sure to include the words 000's omitted somewhere on your spreadsheet)! (Thanks to Chuck Fina for suggesting a tweak to this tip!)

The Microsoft web site has an article that describes how to improve the calculation speed of your worksheets.

Reading a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet in Excel isn't always as easy as it should be. If you're using Excel 5.0 or 7.0, you'll have to save your 1-2-3 file in either the WK1 or WK3 formats. Excel 97 or 2000 can usually read the WK4 format directly. However, if you're using 1-2-3 97, you're out of luck, since the .123 format isn't recognized by Excel. If your 1-2-3 spreadsheet contains formulas that don't have an exact counterpart in Excel, e.g. @XINDEX, Excel will report an error and replace the formula with its value. In some cases Excel will choke on the formatting contained in a 1-2-3 spreadsheet. If so, save the 1-2-3 file in the WK3 format, then delete the associated .FM3 file. You'll then be able to get the data into Excel, at the expense of losing all of your formatting.

www.lostpassword.com offers easy to use password unlocking utilities for Excel 2000 and earlier, as well as server other commercial programs, e.g. Act!, Lotus 1-2-3, etc. We've successfully used their 1-2-3 and Word modules to recover password protected documents.

In Office 2000 and 2002/XP, simply right-click on the character, choose Options, then unclick "Use the Office Assistant." Bring the Assistant back by choosing Help, Show the Office Assistant. In Excel 97, it's a little more difficult: rename the ACTORS folder within C:PROGRAM FILESMICROSOFT OFFICEOFFICE to DEADACTORS or something other than ACTORS.

From time to time, Excel's name space can become corrupt. In such cases, Excel will immediately crash whenever you reference certain named ranges from VBA. For instance, a perfectly functioning VBA routine will suddecausing a General Protection Fault for no apparent reason. If this happens to you, try creating a new workbook, and copy your VBA code and data into the new workbook. (Thanks to Bruce McDonald for diagnosing this problem.)

The next time that you need to copy data from one column or row to another, try dragging while holding down the right mouse button. When you drop the data, Excel presents a special menu with some time saving options. (Thanks again, Stuart!)