Excel Hack - Customising the Ribbon

The set of menus menu items across the top of the screen in Excel (and other Office Applications) is called the "Ribbon".  It's the area at the top of the screen that has a set of easy to access menu items for you to use.  Here's a snapshot of the ribbon with key parts picked out:

Here you can see:

• A set of Tabs (Home, Insert, Data etc) which is top level grouping for the ribbon.
• A set of Groups (Clipboard, Font, Alignment etc) which sub-divide the tabs
• Commands (Bold, Italics, Underline etc) which are contained within the groups.  Usually a subset of commonly used things associated with a group.
• A small downward pointing arrow that when clicked opens the main menu for that Group.  So in this example it will open the main Font menu with lots of extra controls over and above those shown in the ribbon group.

I commonly use the strikethrough command (which makes text look like this) but it's not in the Font group on the ribbon.  Hence I need to customise the ribbon.  I start this by right clicking anywhere on the ribbon and selecting "Customize the Ribbon...".  This brings up the form shown below.  It's quite a busy form so I've circled a key control you'll need to use:

I want to create new Group within the Home tab so I simply click the "New Group" button, and a new Group called "New Group (Custom)" appears under "Ideas" in the "Home" tab.  I right click on this, select "Rename", call the new group "Geek Dad", ignore where I can select an image for the group and click "OK".  I then click on my "Geek Dad" group and drag it up under the Font group.  

The form looks like this with my new group circled in blue and another area of the form we'll be dealing with circled in red:

You then click on what I've circled in red and change it to "Commands not in the ribbon".  Scroll down, find the command you want, (in my case strikethrough), click on it and grab it to your new group.  The form now looks like this:

...and the ribbon looks like this:

So go ahead; customise the ribbon to your hearts content for quick access to the controls you frequently use!  Let me know what you get up to in the comments below.

Excel Basics - Workbooks (Files) and Worksheets (Tabs)

This blog post used Excel from Office 365, version 2021.  This is general stuff so won't change from version to version.

The purpose of this blog post is to tell you about workbooks and worksheets.  A workbook is basically an Excel file.  So a book where you do work.  Get it!

When you start Excel you're presented with a screen like that shown below:

Select "Blank workbook" and you're presented with a new Excel workbook to work in.  

Select "File" and then "Save", find a location to save the file in and give it a name of your choice.  I called mine "fruit_logger.xlsx".  So now my workbook is good and ready!

Now it's time to talk about worksheets, or as they're sometimes called, "tabs".  Think of worksheets as individual pages in your workbook.  You can have different sets of data on each of your worksheets.

You select, edit, add and delete worksheets from the bottom of you workbook.  Here we can see our default worksheet is called "Sheet1":

Right click where it says "Sheet1" to see what options you have.  

First I'll rename it by selecting the "Rename" option.  This turns the worksheet name grey and allows you to delete the old name and type a new name of your choice:

I can then select a tab colour, a useful aid when you have multiple worksheets:

Click on the plus sign next to the worksheet tab and you can add a new worksheet, (by default called "Sheet2".  I can rename and colour it too:

Finally I can delete it by right clicking on the worksheet and selecting "Delete":

Have a play with the menu items that appear when you right click on a worksheet tab and see what else you can do!  Comments below please.