Tech Tip Daily

Who doesn’t love Excel?  On top of all of the great things it can do, it does a heck of a job of looking neat and organized.  While you can create gridlines of certain styles and thicknesses around each cell, sometimes the standard thin-gray ones do the trick.  But by default, these aren’t printed on the spreadsheet.  How do you get excel to print these?

To print gridlines in Excel 2007:

1. Go to the page layout tab at the top of the window
2. Click the “expand” icon to the right of the “Page Setup” group heading.  This will bring up the page setup window.
3. Click the sheet tab
4. Place a check next to “Gridlines” in the print section and click Ok.
5. Alternatively, within the page layout tab, you can check the “Print” box under Gridlines in the Sheet Options group.

In all other versions of Excel:

1. Go to File -> Page Setup
2. Click the sheet tab
3. Check the box next to “Gridlines” in the Print area.
4. Click Ok

That does it!  Thanks, and happy computing!

How many times have you spent hours on a beautifully designed and organized excel spreadsheet, taking care to keep it easy to read yet functional, only to have your employer tell you he wants the whole thing flipped, with the rows as columns and vise versa?  Yeah, well me neither, but doesn’t it sound like a neat thing to be able to do?  It’s definitely something that I imagine I’ll use at one point or another.  Credit for this tip goes to my college roommate Scott (leaving for law school today – good luck friend!).  I had never heard of it until he mentioned it to me.

To invert rows and columns in excel:

1. Open your spreadsheet
2. Select your data table (Interestingly enough, you can’t select the whole table.  Click-and-drag to select all of the cells that contain information)
3. Go to edit -> copy (or ‘ctrl + c’)
4. Select an empty cell below or next to your existing data (try to leave some space between the two so you don’t confuse tables).  Alternatively, you can create a new spreadsheet and paste wherever you please.  Just be sure to close the old table after you copy the data over, and then save the new worksheet to overwrite the old.
5. Go to edit -> paste special.  In the box that appears, check the “transpose” box at the bottom of the window and hit ok.
6. Your new inverted table will appear in the worksheet.  Select all of the rows/columns of the old table to delete the old data and move the new table to position (unless you created a new spreadsheet).

There you have it!  Not a day goes by that I become where I’m not more and more impressed with excel.

That’s all!  Thanks, and happy computing!