Picking data from a list

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.

This week, we have a time-saving tip to help with data entry.

Imagine you’re entering data into a spreadsheet and you have to enter something into a cell which you’ve already typed further up the worksheet. As you may know, if you start typing, Excel will try to guess what you want to write. However, if you have many values beginning with the same letters, you sometimes have to type quite a lot before Excel guesses correctly.

An alternative is to pick the data you want from a list of previously-entered values. You can do this by pressing Alt+Down (arrow). You can then select the value you want, either using the mouse or by using the arrow keys followed by enter. What’s nice about this is that it presents the values in alphabetical order, so it’s much easier to find what you need to.