Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Quick Ways to Add Data

Some of Excel's time-saving frills can make your life easier when you're entering data in a worksheet. This section covers four such features: AutoComplete, AutoCorrect, AutoFill, and AutoFit, along with Excel's top candidates for the Lifetime Most Useful Achievement award: Undo and Redo.

Tip

Excel really has two different types of automatic features. First off, there are features that do things to your spreadsheets automatically, namely AutoComplete and AutoCorrect. Sometimes that's cool and convenient, but other times it can send you running for the old manual typewriter. Fortunately, you can turn off both. Excel also has "auto" features that really aren't that automatic. These include AutoFill and AutoFit, which never run on their own.

UP TO SPEED: Regional Dating

Windows has regional settings for your computer, which affect the way Microsoft programs understand things like dates and currency. You can change the settings, and they don't have to correspond to where you live—you can set them for your company headquarters on another continent, for instance. But keep in mind that these affect all the programs on your computer.

To make a switch, go to the Start menu in Windows and choose Settings → Control Panel, then double-click Regional and Language Options, which brings up a dialog box. The Regional Options tab has the settings you want. The most important setting is in the first box, which has a drop-down list you can use to pick the region you want, like English ...