Learn about over 270 Excel shortcut keys on the Accessibility section Microsoft web site at http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/keyboard/keyboardsearch.asp

Did you know that you can quickly navigate multi-sheet workbooks by right-clicking on the arrow buttons at the bottom left-hand side of the screen? Doing so causes a menu with all sheet names to appear. Left click on the sheet of your choice, and then that sheet will be immediately activated.

Excel Programming Weekend Crash Course is a great reference book for anyone interested in learning how to create macros in Excel. Even experienced VBA users will pick up a few new tricks. The material is broken down into chapters that take 30 minutes to complete, so it's easy to work through the material at your own pace.

To quickly copy data down a column, try double-clicking on the fill handle. Excel will automatically copy down the current column, and stop at the last non-blank cell in the preceding column. The Fill Handle is the little notch in the bottom-right hand corner of the active worksheet cell.

=DATEDIF - If you ever need to determine the number of months between two dates, the simplest way is with the =DATEDIF function. Here's a sample scenario: =DATEDIF(A1,B1,"m") will return 12 if cell A1 contains the date 01/01/02 and cell B1 contains the date 12/31/02. If this is a function you can use, make sure to make a note of it in a place where you'll remember, because it's only documented in Excel 2000! You won't find mention of it in any other Excel version. Chip Pearson offers some additional background on this function, including its storied history.

Selecting Data - Rather than using your mouse to highlight a range of data, try holding down the Shift key, then at the same time use the arrow keys or Page-Up/Page-Down keys to select your data. Using the keyboard to select data offers much more control over the cursor, so that your mouse doesn't end up at row 38,472 when you're only trying to highlight down to row 148.

Using a spreadsheet that contains links that you can't identify can be frustrating. Fortunately, we have a free download that will give you some relief. To install the add-in, download the file, then in Excel, click Tools, Add-Ins, Browse, locate and double-click the findlink.xla file, then click OK. A Find Links choice will appear on your Tools menu. An alternate way to find links is to search for exclamation marks (!) or "*.xls" without the quote marks.

If you're interested in the technical details on how this utliity works, read the article available at http://www.microsoft.com/europe/vba/downloads/mod199806dr.doc

Here's the last tip in our series of eradicating links. Microsoft offers a free Delete Links Wizard, which is available from http://www.acctadv.com/go.mv?id=deletelinks

Enter =CELL("filename") in a worksheet cell to display the name and path of your spreadsheet. If you save the file in a new location, the formula will update automatically. (Our thanks go to Manprit S.) http://www.acctadv.com/go.mv?id=tip