Excel 2010 cheat sheet

Have you come to Microsoft Excel 2010 by way of Excel 2007, or did you skip directly from Excel 2003 or an earlier version? Those in the former group are likely to have a very different upgrade experience from those in the latter group.

Share this story: IT folks, we hope you’ll pass this guide on to your users to help them learn the Excel 2010 ropes.

If you’re in the former group, you’ll find a few small interface tweaks and a handful of useful new features in Excel 2010. If you’re in the latter group, you’ll find an overhauled interface that radically changes how you interact with common features and functions.

Either way, we’ve got you covered. This cheat sheet shows newcomers to the interface how to get around; it also explores features that are brand-new in Excel 2010. We’ve noted which sections of the story former Excel 2007 users can skip over.

Get acclimated to the new Excel

To help you find your way around Excel 2010, here’s a quick guided tour of the revamped interface; follow along using the screenshot below.

The Quick Access toolbar. Introduced in Excel 2007, this mini-toolbar offers buttons for the most commonly used commands, and you can customize it with whatever buttons you like, as we’ll explain later in the story.

The File tab/Backstage. The File tab in Excel 2010 replaces the Office orb button in Excel 2007, which replaced the old File menu found in earlier versions of Excel. Click it, and it leads you to Backstage, a new command center where you can handle an array of tasks, including opening, printing and sharing files; customization; version control and more. As you’ll see later in this story, Backstage represents the biggest change in Excel 2010.

The Ribbon. Love it or hate it, the Ribbon is the main way you’ll work with Excel. Instead of old-style menus, submenus, sub-submenus and so on, the Ribbon groups small icons for common tasks together in tabs on a big, well, ribbon. So, for example, when you click the Insert tab, the Ribbon appears with buttons for items that you can insert into a spreadsheet, such as charts, tables, PivotTables, clip art or a hyperlink.

The Excel 2010 Ribbon looks and works much the same as the Excel 2007 Ribbon, with one nifty addition: In Excel 2010, you can customize what’s on the Ribbon.

The Scrollbar. This is largely unchanged from previous versions of Excel; use it to scroll up and down. At the top, there’s a double arrow that, when clicked upon, expands the area at the top of the worksheet that displays the contents of the current cell. Just below the double arrow is a tiny button that looks like a minus sign that lets you split your screen in two.

The View toolbar. As with Excel 2007, there is a View toolbar at the bottom right of the screen that lets you choose between Normal, Page Layout and Page Break Preview — the latter view shows you how your spreadsheet will look when it prints. There’s also a slider that lets you zoom in or out of your document.

Learn to love the Ribbon

If you’re comfortable with the Ribbon interface in Excel 2007, you’ll be happy to hear that it’s basically the same in Excel 2010. You can skip directly to the next section of the story, “Find your way around Backstage,” where you’ll learn, among other things, how to customize the Ribbon — a feature that wasn’t available in Excel 2007.

If the Ribbon is new to you, here’s what you need to know. At first, the Ribbon may be off-putting, but the truth is that once you learn to use it, you’ll find that it’s far easier to use than the old Excel interface. It does take some getting used to, though.

By default, the Ribbon is divided into eight tabs, with an optional ninth one (Developer). Here’s a rundown of the tabs and what each one does:

File (also known as Backstage): As you’ll read later in the story, here’s where you perform a variety of tasks such as printing, sharing files, customizing the Ribbon and more.

Home: This contains the most commonly used Excel features, such as formatting tables, rows, cells and text; inserting a few basic formulas; and sorting and filtering.

Insert: As the name implies, this tab handles anything you might want to insert into a spreadsheet, such as charts, pictures, clip art, PivotTables, tables, equations, headers and footers. It also lets you insert two new types of content introduced in Excel 2010: Sparklines and Slicers. (More on those later.)

Page Layout: Here’s where you change margins, page size and orientation; apply themes; define your print area; set page breaks; specify which rows and columns will print on each page and so on.

Formulas: If you’re a spreadsheet jockey, you’ll be spending a lot of time on this tab. As the name says, it’s where you go to insert and work with formulas. It organizes all of Excel’s formulas into categories, such as Financial, Logical, Math & Trig and so on, so they’re all within easy reach. And it also gives you quick access to useful formula-checking features, such as error checking and the ability to trace precedents and dependents.

Data: Whatever you need to do with data, you’ll do it here. For example, you can use this tab to import data from a wide variety of sources, including the Web, Access, SQL Server, XML import and so on. You can also filter and sort data, validate your data, group and ungroup data, and perform data analysis, among other features.

Review: Need to work in markup mode, review other people’s markups or compare documents? This is the tab for you. It also lets you protect worksheets and workbooks, share workbooks, check spelling and grammar, and look up a word in a thesaurus.

View: Here’s where to go when you want to change the view in any way, including displaying or turning off gridlines and the formula bar, zooming in and out, splitting and hiding panes, and so on.

Developer: If you write code or create forms and applications for Excel, this is your tab. It also includes macro handling, so power users might also want to visit here every once in a while.

The Developer tab is hidden by default. To display it, click the File tab and choose Options –> Customize Ribbon and then check the box next to Developer in the Customize the Ribbon section.

Each tab along the Ribbon is organized to make it easy to get your work done. As you can see below, each tab is organized into a series of groups that contain related commands for getting something done — in our example, handling fonts.

Inside each group is a set of what Microsoft calls command buttons, which carry out commands, display menus and so on. In the example, the featured command button changes the font size.

There’s also a small diagonal arrow in the bottom-right corner of some groups, which Microsoft calls a dialog box launcher. Click it to display more options related to the group.

All that seems simple enough…so it’s time to throw a curveball at you. The Ribbon is context-sensitive, changing according to what you’re doing. Depending on the task you’re engaged in, it sometimes adds more tabs and subtabs.

For example, when you insert and highlight a chart, several entirely new tabs appear: Design, Layout and Format, with a Chart Tools supertitle on top, as you can see here.

Other “now you see them, now you don’t” tabs include Picture Tools, Table Tools and SmartArt Tools — all of which appear in response to various actions you take in Excel.

Find your way around Backstage

Backstage is a one-stop shop for doing common tasks such as saving, printing and sharing files, getting information about your spreadsheets, and more. It brings together a variety of functions that were found in multiple locations in previous versions of Excel.

When you click the File tab on the Ribbon, you’re sent to Backstage. The Ribbon disappears and is replaced by a series of items down the left-hand side of the screen, most of which are self-explanatory, such as Save, Save As, Open, Close, Recent, New, Print and Help.

However, there are three choices that are not so self-explanatory but can be enormously helpful:

Info

On the far right of the screen, Info shows useful information about the file you’re working on, including its size, title, author, and tags, as well as the last time it was modified and printed, the last person who modified it, and similar information.

But finding information about the file is just the start of what you can do when you click the Info button. If you’ve opened a document that’s not in the latest Excel format (.xlsx), such as a .xls file, you’ll see a Compatibility Mode area, which lets you know that some of the newest Excel features have been disabled to ensure compatibility with the older format. Click the Convert button if you want to convert the file into the new format, but note that some layout formatting may change.

Click Protect Workbook in the Permissions area to specify who has rights to read and edit the file. You can also restrict all editing or set similar permissions options.

Before sharing the file with anyone, click Check for Issues in the Prepare for Sharing area — this will let you see if you’ve left any hidden information or fields in the document, for instance, or if the file is incompatible with earlier versions of Excel.

Click Manage Versions in the Versions area if you would like to see earlier versions of the file that have been auto-saved.

Save & Send

Excel 2010 was built for a world in which documents and their contents are meant to be shared in many ways, such as via email, in Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software, or in the cloud. Click Save & Send, and you get options to do all that and more.

Send Using E-mail attaches the current document to a blank outgoing email, using your default mail program. You can send it in its current format, as a PDF or an XPS (a PDF-like Microsoft format) file, or as an Internet fax. If the file is stored in a shared location, you can choose to email a link rather than an attachment.

Save to Web lets you save the file to Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud-based file storage site. Of course, you need to have a SkyDrive account, and you’ll be prompted to log in the first time you use this feature. After that, you can save the current file to any of your folders on SkyDrive.

Save to SharePoint lets you save your file to a SharePoint server for sharing with co-workers — check with your IT department if you don’t have your organization’s SharePoint access information.

The Save & Send section of Backstage also lets you convert the file to a variety of other file types, such as tab-delimited text, comma-delimited text (.csv), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), XML, PDF, XPS and many others. Note that if you do this, you may lose some layout formatting.

Options

Here’s where you can customize the way Excel looks and works, taking care of everything from how text and formatting marks display, to what buttons appear in the Quick Access toolbar, to proofing options and more.

New to Excel 2010 is the ability to customize the Ribbon. After you click Options, click Customize Ribbon, and you can choose what you want shown on each of the Ribbon’s tabs.

Show trends with Sparklines

Though creating charts and graphs in Excel has become easier over the years, such visualizations are often overkill. They take up space, and sometimes you spend more time getting the look right than you should.

New in Excel 2010, Sparklines are smart, simple graphics you add to a single cell to give quick visual representations of data, especially data that changes over time — for example, unit sales of a particular item over the course of several years. A Sparkline can show you at a glance the historic ups and downs of that item.

Sparklines come in three flavors: line, column and win/loss. As with any Excel chart, the Sparkline is redrawn automatically when you change the data in its data range.

To create a Sparkline, move your cursor to the cell where you want to insert the mini-chart. On the Insert tab, find the Sparklines group in the middle of the Ribbon. Click on the type of Sparkline (line, column, win/loss) you want. In the pop-up dialog box, choose the source range (the data you want to plot) and click OK.

Notice that the Ribbon changes to display the Sparkline Tools/Design tab, where you can modify the properties of the graphic — switching among the three types of Sparklines, changing the overall color scheme or adding color to individual elements. Negative values can be displayed as red dots (in line Sparklines) or red columns (in column and win/loss Sparklines).

Slice and dice your data with Slicers

The process of working with data in PivotTables was much improved in Excel 2007, and Excel 2010 goes a few steps farther. Filtering data has been considerably streamlined with the inclusion of Slicers, which are small windows that make it easy to click values to add or remove them from a PivotTable filter.

In the example below, Slicers for State and City have been attached to a PivotTable. Clicking a value on a Slicer includes or excludes it from the filter. (Blue shading indicates that a value is included; white means it’s not.)

Slicers are easy to set up. Click anywhere in a PivotTable, and on the PivotTable Tools tab that appears in the Ribbon, choose Options –> Insert Slicer. Choose the field you want to filter from the list of fields in your PivotTable, then choose OK. Excel opens a Slicer window with a button for each existing value in the selected field.

If you want to limit the results to California, define a Slicer for the State field, then click on just California in the new State Slicer. If you Ctrl-click on Oregon, Excel will update the PivotTable to show results from just those two states.

There are some limitations to Slicers. Once you select a field to display in a Slicer window, you can’t subdivide it or group values — you can’t create a Slicer by calendar quarter for a “month” field, for example. You can sort Slicer buttons from A to Z or from Z to A, but you can’t specify your own order (such as North, South, East, West).

Slicers can, however, be moved about your worksheet and resized. They’re a good choice for creating dashboards, and they’re intuitive for even novice users to work with. You can also use the same Slicer in different PivotTables; we provide the steps for doing so later in this story.

More new features in Excel 2010

While Backstage, Sparklines and Slicers are the most important new features in Excel 2010, there are several others that are well worth exploring. Here are a few of our favorites.

Paste Preview

Here’s a once-simple question that has gotten more complex with time: How do you want to handle content that you paste into Excel?

If you’re copying a section of another spreadsheet, for example, do you want to copy the values or the formulas — or both — as in the original? How do you want to handle formatting — keep the original formatting or that of the spreadsheet you’re pasting into? Would you like to paste the values as a graphic instead? Do you want to create a link to the original content?

Excel’s new Paste Preview feature solves the problem elegantly. When you paste anything into Excel, a small icon of a clipboard appears next to what you’re pasting, with a down-pointing triangle next to the clipboard. If you click the triangle, you will see small thumbnails for all the paste options available to you for the specific type of content you’re pasting — whether to retain formatting of the data you’re importing, or to paste the formula itself or the data created by the formula, or to retain the borders of the cell you’re importing, and so on.

Depending on what you’re pasting, those options may be very simple or very complex. Hover your mouse over any thumbnail to see a description of what the paste option will do.

Even though this feature is called Paste Preview, you don’t actually get a preview of the way your content will look . In Excel, Paste Preview is more about the way data is imported, not how it’s displayed.

PivotTable and PivotChart enhancements

Slicers aren’t the only improvements to PivotTables in Excel 2010. It’s now possible to show values in a completely new and useful way. The Show Values As feature adds several new automatic calculations, such as percent of parent row/column total, percent of running total, or rank (smallest to largest or vice versa). And for larger PivotTables, you may appreciate how you can now repeat labels in columns.

If you use the pop-up window to do simple filtering of data, you’ll find that the search box starts displaying values as soon as you begin entering your search term, which can accelerate searching.

Also, table headers remain visible at the top of your table as you scroll up and down; and if you apply a filter to the table, those filter conditions are accessible by clicking on the filter icon in the table headings.

PivotTables aren’t the only display element with easy filtering. PivotCharts now include buttons to help you control what is displayed. They repeat the controls you find in the Field List sidebar, and all can be turned off at once before you print the chart.

Proactive protection against problems

If you’re in a hurry, you may exit Excel 2010 without saving your work. Excel will now protect you from yourself by letting you recover previous versions of a file — even those you didn’t save.

Heedful of another potential problem — malware-laden files — Excel 2010 introduces the Protected View feature. If you open a file you received as an email attachment or downloaded from the Internet, Excel opens it in Protected View and places a small warning message at the top of the file. At this stage you can view the file, but you can’t edit or print it; it’s essentially blocked from accessing your computer.

Similarly, if you open a workbook that contains “active content” such as macros, Excel by default disables the macros and displays a warning message.

In either case, if you know the file is safe, click the Enable button; Excel marks the file as a Trusted Document and you can now edit it. When you open the file again after saving it, you won’t see the nag message and you can work with the file normally.

If Protected View annoys you, click File –> Options –> Trust Center –> Trust Center Settings. From there you can turn off Protected View altogether or customize it to a limited extent — for example, you could turn it off for documents you receive in Outlook but leave it on for documents you download from the Web.

Image editing tools

Excel 2010 offers new tools for performing basic image editing on a graphic or photo you’re using in a document. These tools certainly don’t rival Photoshop or even midrange image-editing software, but for basic, quick-and-dirty editing, they’re quite good.

Select an image in a workbook and you’ll see the Picture Tools tab on the Ribbon. The tools are straightforward and self-explanatory. For changing the brightness or contrast, for example, click the appropriate button at the left end of the Ribbon and you’ll see thumbnails that show you the results of changing the brightness and contrast in various pre-set ways. Simply select the one you want to apply, and it’s done.

The Remove Background button does what it says — it removes the background of a photo so that you can create a silhouette. The Color button gives you a wide variety of options, such as Recolor, which lets you perform tasks such as converting a color photo to grayscale or black-and-white.

If you want to reduce the amount of space your workbook takes up on your hard disk, or shrink a picture because you’re posting the file with the picture onto the Web, click Compress Pictures and make your selection.

You can also add a variety of shadows and special effects by clicking the Picture Effects button. And pay attention to the Preset option when you choose Picture Effects, because you can choose from a variety of effects already selected for you, including 3D effects.

Other image-editing tools include adding “artistic effects” such as making a photograph look like an Impressionist painting. Again, it’s all straightforward and self-explanatory, especially if you’ve used graphics-editing tools before.

Other tweaks to know about

Excel 2010 is available in a 64-bit version, removing the 2GB workbook limit of the 32-bit version. Other limits have been raised, such as the number of data points you can plot in a chart (though let’s face it, more isn’t always better — and it often makes for much messier charts). You can also now double-click on a chart element to change its formatting.

Speed is a focus of Excel 2010. For instance, multi-threading makes PivotTables retrieve, sort, and filter data faster; saving large files is also faster. Microsoft has also addressed several graphics-related performance issues — charts are moved and resized faster, and Excel is now more responsive to working with shapes. Large worksheets are also handled more quickly (especially filtering and sorting), and Excel 2010 supports asynchronous user-defined functions.

For statisticians and scientists, Microsoft says its calculations are more accurate, mentioning beta and chi-squared distributions in particular. A variety of new statistical, engineering, math and trigonometry functions have been added. (For a complete list of function changes, see Microsoft’s Excel 2010 site.)

A few small changes from Excel 2007

Microsoft introduced a number of useful features in — including new visualization tools, Styles and Themes, and an array of table tools — that users of earlier Excel versions will likely want to learn about. These are still available in Excel 2010, and for the most part they work as they did in Excel 2007, with a few small changes and enhancements:

Conditional formatting options — for, say, highlighting duplicates, unique values or values in the top or bottom 10% — have been expanded: Conditions can now be set based on cells in other worksheets within the same workbook.

When you’re using icon sets as visualization tools — such as green, yellow and red traffic lights to illustrate high, medium and low values — you can now turn one or more of the icons off (so just the highest values show a traffic light, for example). And the collection of icon sets has been expanded to include triangles, boxes and stars.

Excel 2007 introduced gradient vertical bars — the higher the cell value, the (proportionally) longer the bar. Unfortunately, negative values threw the program for a loop. That’s been corrected; negative values appear to the left of a new vertical axis, and positive values extend to the right.

Like Excel 2007, Excel 2010 defaults to saving files in the new .xlsx format. If you are sharing workbooks with users of Excel 2003 or earlier versions, you may want to automatically save files in the older .xls format instead. To save all future workbooks in the older format by default, click on the File tab to open the Backstage interface. Choose Options –> Save –> Save files in this format –> Excel 97-2003 Workbook. Click OK.

Some features have been retired or altered in Excel 2010. For example, the Conditional Sum Wizard (for assistance with writing a formula that includes only cells meeting specific conditions) has been replaced by SUMIF and SUMIFS functions. Old formulas using the Wizard will, fortunately, continue to work.

Also removed is the Lookup Wizard (for writing formulas using cells at the intersection of specified rows and columns); you’ll have to use the Function Wizard instead.

Smart Tags (tiny triangles in the corners of cells) are still present, but they no longer display information when you simply mouse over them; you’ll need to right-click on the cell instead.

If you’re a power user and work with Excel’s Solver feature (to find solutions using more sophisticated methods than the built-in Goal Seek feature), you’ll have to explicitly enable the Solver feature in Excel 2010; it’s no longer installed by default. To load Solver, click on the File tab and choose Options –> Add-ins –> Solver Add-in –> Go. (If Excel warns you that the add-in isn’t installed, click Yes to install it.) Check the Solver Add-in box and click OK. The Solver icon now appears on the Data tab in the Analysis group.

Six tips for working with Excel 2010

With the introduction of the Ribbon in 2007, many familiar ways of interacting with Excel became hard to find while powerful new tools cropped up. These six tips can help you get the most out of the new interface and features and locate your old favorites.

Hide the Ribbon

Ribbon taking up too much screen space? You can temporarily turn it off. Doing this will get you back plenty of screen real estate, as you can see in the screenshot below.

To hide the Ribbon, you can either press Ctrl-F1 (and press Ctrl-F1 again to make the Ribbon reappear) or just right-click anywhere in the Ribbon and select “Minimize the Ribbon.”

The Ribbon will still be available when you want it — all you need to do is click on the appropriate tab (Home, Insert, Page Layout, etc.) and it appears. It then discreetly goes away when you are no longer using it.

Add commands to the Quick Access toolbar

By letting you customize the Ribbon, Excel 2010 has gotten a lot more flexible than Excel 2007. But it can still be helpful to customize the Quick Access toolbar for one-click access to your most frequently used commands, no matter which Ribbon tab is showing.

As mentioned earlier in the story, you can do this via Backstage’s Options screen, but a quicker way is to click the small down arrow to the right on the Quick Access toolbar and choose More Commands.

From the left-hand side of the screen that appears, choose commands that you want to add to the toolbar and click Add. You can change the order in which the buttons appear on the toolbar by highlighting a button on the right side of the screen and using the up and down arrows to move it.

The list of commands you see on the left may seem somewhat limited at first. That’s because Excel is showing you only the most popular commands. Click the drop-down menu under “Choose commands from” at the top of the screen, and you’ll see other lists of commands — All Commands, Home Tab and so on. Select any option, and there will be plenty of commands you can add.

Finally, there’s an even easier way to add a command. Right-click any object on the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.” You can add not only individual commands in this way, but also entire groups — for example, the Sparklines group.

Share Slicers across PivotTables

Here’s a nifty Slicer trick: You can tie the same Slicer to multiple PivotTables so that, for example, you could select the West region in a Slicer and all connected PivotTables would filter their respective data on the same field. You can even make this work when the PivotTables are on different workbooks. Here’s how to do it:

1. Create your first PivotTable on a workbook and define a Slicer: Click anywhere inside the PivotTable. Excel adds a PivotTable Tools tab to the Ribbon. Choose the Options subtab, and in the Ribbon that appears, click on the Insert Slicer icon (do not click the down-pointing arrow that reads “Insert Slicer” — we’ll cover that option in a moment).

2. Choose the field you want to filter from the list of fields in your PivotTable, then choose OK. Repeat for each Slicer you want to create.

3. Create another PivotTable on the same worksheet. This PivotTable must have a field with the same name as the field in the first PivotTable for which you created the Slicer in Step 2. Click anywhere within this second PivotTable, then once again choose the Options subtab from the PivotTable Tools tab. This time, however, choose the down-pointing arrow that reads “Insert Slicer” and choose “Slicer Connections…”

4. Excel displays a list of Slicers from the first PivotTable. Check the boxes for the Slicers you want to apply to your second PivotTable and choose OK. Check to see that the Slicer filters data in both PivotTables simultaneously.

5. Copy and paste your second PivotTable to a new worksheet. The connection to the original Slicer is still intact. You can now delete the second PivotTable from the original worksheet.

Note: Before moving on to Step 5, be sure to connect all the Slicers you want to work with your second PivotTable in Step 4. If you decide that you want to add another Slicer after you’ve already moved the second PivotTable to another worksheet, you’ll have to go back to Step 3 and start again on the original worksheet.

Find your old friends

If you’ve been using Excel 2007, you’ve probably found most of the features and functions you used in earlier versions of Excel. But if you’re upgrading directly to Excel 2010 from Excel 2003 or earlier, you may have a harder time locating many of your favorite commands.

Use our for an extensive list of where to find your old friends in the newest version of Excel. To save you more time, we’ve also included keyboard shortcuts for all these commands.

Use macros

As in Excel 2007, macros — ingenious shortcuts you can create for performing repetitive tasks — are hard to find in Excel 2010. But they’re there: If you display the Developer tab, you’ll find the macro tools in all their glory in the Code group. In fact, they’re easier to reach than they were in earlier versions of Excel.

You’ll find everything you want in the Code group. Record a macro by clicking the Record Macro button, manage your macros by clicking the Macros button, and configure security for a macro by clicking the Macro Security button.

(Bonus bug fix: Unlike in Excel 2007, recording a macro when formatting a chart in Excel 2010 will now actually produce macro code.)

Use keyboard shortcuts

If you’ve been using keyboard shortcuts in Excel 2007, Excel 2003 or earlier versions, take heart — most of the same ones work in Excel 2010. Any shortcuts that use the Ctrl key, such as Ctrl-C for copying to the clipboard and Ctrl-V for pasting, still work. And most of the old Alt-key shortcuts work as well, although not every one of them. See the table at the bottom of the page for the most useful shortcuts in Excel.

You can also use a clever set of keyboard shortcuts for working with the Ribbon. (These are unchanged from Excel 2007.) Press the Alt key, and then a tiny letter or number icon will appear on the menu for each tab — for example, the letter H for the Home tab. Now press that letter on your keyboard, and you’ll display that tab or menu item. When the tab appears, there will be letters and numbers for most options on the tab as well.

Once you’ve started to learn these shortcuts, you’ll naturally begin using key combinations. So instead of pressing Alt then H to display the home tab, you can press Alt-H together.

The screenshot above shows the most useful Alt key combinations in Excel 2010. For more nifty keyboard shortcuts, see the table below. And even more shortcuts are listed on Microsoft’s Office 2010 site.

Next:

Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006). Rich Ericson is a Northwest-based technology writer and the reviews editor of The Office Letter, a site devoted to tips for Microsoft Office.