10 Tips For Navigating Microsoft Excel

Learn 10 tips to improve your mastery of Microsoft Excel, including tricks for navigating, adding, deleting, renaming and grouping worksheets within a workbook.

Microsoft Excel has become a powerful tool used in businesses of all types. What started (and is still used) as an accounting tool, the product now is ever-present in offices around the world. Mastering some key functions in Excel can help your users work more efficiently.

Here’s a look at 10 top navigation tips.

Use the arrow
If you have lots of worksheets open (Excel lets you have as many as 1,000) in your workbook, it can be difficult to find the one you need. On the bottom left are two black arrows that can be used to scroll through the different worksheets to find the one you need. Click on it and it becomes the active sheet.

You can also use the Ctrl key with the arrows to move to the first or last sheet. Right-clicking on either of the arrows brings up a pop-up window with a complete list of your worksheets. Click on the name and brings you to that worksheet.

Use the shortcuts
The following shortcuts can save you time moving through your workbook:

• Ctrl + Page Down: Go to the next worksheet
• Ctrl + Page Up: Go to the previous worksheet

Right-click to manage worksheets
Right-clicking on any worksheet brings up a list of helpful options. Here you can quickly change the worksheet color, rename a worksheet, or copy or delete it.

Insert a new worksheet
There are four ways to add a new worksheet to your workbook.

• Right-click on any worksheet tab and select the Insert option
• Shift + F11
• Click on the plus sign in a circle on the bottom right of the tab listings
• Go to the Home menu, go to the Cells section, click on Insert and select Insert Sheet

Delete a worksheet
Right-clicking provides you with the option to delete a worksheet. If there’s data in the worksheet a warning will appear.

You can also go to the Home tab in the Cells group and click on Delete and select Delete Sheet. A word of warning about deleting sheets. You cannot undo a sheet deletion.

Rename a worksheet
There are three options, from slowest to fastest:

• Go to the Home tab, click on the Cells group and the Format option. You’ll see a choice to Rename Sheet. This will activate the name box for the sheet
• Right-click on the worksheet tab and choose the rename option
• Double-click on the worksheet tab

Add a tab color
Large workbooks can make it difficult to organize and find a needed worksheet. Adding color tags to the worksheet tabs is a big help. Right-click on the tab, select Tab Color and choose the shade you want.

Move a worksheet
This is a simple tip. To move a worksheet, click the tab and hold. A mouse pointer will appear and you can move the tab to the spot you want.

Copy a worksheet
When you need to copy a worksheet within the same workbook, copying and pasting is not the best option. The copied data often does not look the same and can require a lot of time to fix.

Another option is to again click and hold the tab you want to copy, and hit the Ctrl key. Move to the spot you want to add the copied worksheet and a new tab will be added.

Group worksheets
When you want to add headers and footers or formatting to multiple worksheets, Excel does not have an intuitive solution. Using the Grouping function lets you handle several key tasks that apply to more than one sheet.

These tips will accelerate how fast work is done and give your employees more confidence and control of their Excel work.

Attackers Embed Malware In Microsoft Office Documents To Bypass Browser Security

Chris Myers is a field service technician for Tech Experts.

Cyber attacks continue to increase at a rapid rate. In 2016, there were 6,447 software security vulnerabilities found or reported to authorities. In 2017, that number rose to 14,714, more than double the previous year. Halfway through 2018, we are at 8,177 with no signs of slowing.

One of the biggest avenues of attacks is Adobe Flash Player, which has been a leading source of vulnerabilities for over 20 years.

Modern browsers have been phasing out Adobe Flash over the past 5 years. In December 2016, Google Chrome completely disabled Flash Player by default.

Mozilla Firefox started to block the most vulnerable parts of Flash Player by default in 2016 and 2017.

The latest Flash Player vulnerability, designated CVE-2018-5002 by Adobe, aims to circumvent those browser changes by hiding the attack in a Microsoft Excel file, which is then distributed by targeted emails disguised as legitimate bulletins from hiring websites.

To hide this from anti-virus software, the hackers went another step further by not including the malicious code directly in the Excel file. Instead, they just embed a small snippet that tells the file to load a Flash module from somewhere else on the Internet. Due to this, the file appears to be a normal Excel document with Flash controls to anti-virus applications.

CVE-2018-5002 is what’s known as a Zero Day vulnerability, which means it was used by attackers before it was discovered and patched.

This particular vulnerability appears to have been used in the Middle East already.

In one instance, businesses in Qatar received an email that mimicked “bayt.com,” a Middle Eastern job search website. The attackers sent the email from “dohabayt.com.”

With Doha being the capitol of Qatar, it was easy to assume that dohabayt was simply an extension of the main website.

However, a true branch of bayt.com, known as a subdomain, would be separated by a period like so: doha.bayt.com. Once the target was tricked into opening the email, they were directed to download and open the attached Microsoft Excel file named “Salaries.”

This was a normal-looking table of average Middle Eastern job salaries, but in the background, the attack was already going to work.

How To Avoid Being Infected
The fake email scenario described above is known as phishing. Phishing is the attempt to disguise something as legitimate to gain sensitive information or compromise their computer.

The word phishing is a homophone of fishing, coined for the similarity of using bait in an attempt to catch a victim.

The attack described above was a type of phishing known as spear phishing, where the attacker tailored their methods specifically to the intended victim.

They disguised the email as a local site used for job or employee hiring, and the file as a desirable database of salary information.

Phishing emails are most easily identified by checking the sender’s email address. Look at the unbroken text just before the “.com”.

If this is not a website known to you or if it contains gibberish such as a random string of numbers and letters, then the email is almost always fake.

While the attack above was sophisticated, most phishing emails simply try to trick the user by saying things like “Your emails have been blocked, click here to unblock them” or “Click here to view your recent order” when you did not actually order anything.

Always be vigilant. When in doubt, forward the email to your IT department or provider for them to check the email for viruses or other threats.

Excel 2007 Has A “Small” Problem Multiplying

We all learned how to multiply with pencil and paper, even great big numbers and decimals. But when it comes to something important like a blueprint or a scientific formula we reach for a calculator – or a spreadsheet.

That’s much more reliable, right? Well, not if the spreadsheet is Excel 2007. Technicians have revealed that Excel 2007 thinks that 850*77.1 is 100,000.

What’s the correct answer? It should be 65,535. Other sites have verified that the error carries over into some (but not all) calculations based on the incorrect result.

If it were just 850*77.1 that gave a wrong answer, we could probably work around that. But there are tons of other problem numbers. Set up a spreadsheet to divide 65,535 by every number from 1 to 65,535 itself, then multiply the number by that result.

So, for example, the spreadsheet divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer.

We won’t know just why the problem comes up until Microsoft speaks out, but there is one thing about 65535 – it’s the very largest 16-bit number.

In hexadecimal (the programmer’s friend) it’s FFFF. But converting the “problem” results to hexadecimal in Excel yields FFFE. That’s  a clue.

Meanwhile, if you have any spreadsheets where some results hit the range around 65535, it might be a good idea to double-check with your trusty calculator… or a pencil.

GOOD NEWS: The Excel team has dissected the problem in detail and is working feverishly to swat this Excel bug.

And finally, two weeks after the scary announcement, Microsoft has fixed the bug. Get the hotfix now, or just wait for it to show up in Automatic Updates.