Excel for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet

Windows may get all the press coverage, but when you want to get real work done, you turn your attention to the applications that run on it. And if you use spreadsheets, that generally means Excel.

Excel is, of course, part of Microsoft’s Office suite of productivity tools. Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase a Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.

When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2019 or Office 2021 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Microsoft 365 apps are continually updated with new features. For more details, see “Office 2021 vs. Microsoft 365: How to choose.”

This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the features that have been introduced in Microsoft 365’s Excel for Windows desktop client since 2015. We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out. (If you’re using the perpetual-license Excel 2016 or 2019, see our seperate Excel 2016 and 2019 cheat sheet. If you have Office 2021, check out “What’s new in Office 2021.”)

Use the Ribbon

The Ribbon interface that you came to know and love (or perhaps hate) in earlier versions of Excel is still alive and well. Since the Ribbon has been included in Office applications since Office 2007, we assume that by now you’re familiar with how it works. If you need a refresher, see our Excel 2010 cheat sheet.

In 2018, Microsoft overhauled the way the Ribbon looks, and the company has continued to tinker with the design since then. It’s now flatter-looking, cleaner, and less cluttered, and it has high-contrast colors, which makes the icons and text on the Ribbon easier to see. Some time after Microsoft released Windows 11, the company again gave the Ribbon (and Office overall) a slight facelift, so it more closely aligns with that new version of Windows. But it still works in the same way, and you’ll find most of the commands in the same locations as in earlier versions.

IDG

The new look appears in both Windows 10 and Windows 11, but depending on your installation, it may or may not show up by default. You can check by clicking the icon of a megaphone near the top right of the screen above the Ribbon. In the Coming Soon screen that appears, look at the “Try the new experience” slider. If it’s “On,” it likely means you’re using the new interface. If it’s “Off” and you’d like to turn it on, move the slider to “On” and restart Excel. That should turn on the new look.

One minor change to the Ribbon layout is that there’s now a Help tab to the right of the View tab. To find out which commands reside on which tabs on the Ribbon, download our Excel for Microsoft 365 Ribbon guide. Also note that you can use the search bar on the Ribbon to find commands.

Just as in previous versions of Excel, if you want the Ribbon commands to go away, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the tabs above the Ribbon — File, Home, Insert, and so on — stay visible.) To make them reappear, press Ctrl-F1 again.

You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon (a down arrow) on the bottom of the Ribbon at the far right, just below the Share button. A drop-down menu appears with these four options:

• Full-screen mode: This makes Excel take up your entire screen and hides the Ribbon. To get out of full-screen mode, click the three-dot icon at the upper right of the screen.
• Show tabs only: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1, click a tab, or click the Ribbon display options down arrow and select Always show Ribbon.
• Always show Ribbon: This displays the entire Ribbon, both the tabs and commands underneath them.
• Show Quick Access toolbar: This displays the Quick Access toolbar, which gives you fast access to Excel commands you want to have available no matter which tab you’re on. When you enable the toolbar, it starts off empty. To populate it, click a small down arrow that appears at the right of the toolbar and from the drop-down menu that appears, choose which features to put on it. If you don’t see a command you want, click More Commands. Find the command you want on the left and click Add. To make the Quick Access toolbar go away, click the Ribbon display options down arrow and select Hide Quick Access toolbar.

To customize the title bar above the Ribbon, select File > Options, and from the screen that appears, select General. In the “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office” section, click the down arrow next to Office Theme and select Dark Gray, Black, or White from the drop-down menu. To make the title bar green again, instead choose the Colorful option from the drop-down list.

There’s a useful feature in what Microsoft calls the backstage area that appears when you click the File tab on the Ribbon. If you click Open or Save a Copy from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You’ll be able to see at a glance which is which.

IDG

Possibly in the works: a simplified Ribbon

Way back in 2018, Microsoft announced that it was working on a simplified version of the Ribbon for all Office applications. Like the existing Ribbon, it would have tabs across the top, and each tab would have commands on it. But it would be more streamlined and use less space than the existing Ribbon.

Nearly 5 years later, Outlook for Windows is the only Microsoft 365 desktop app that offers the simplified Ribbon. At this point we’re somewhat skeptical that it will ever appear in the Excel desktop app. However, it has rolled out to the web version of Excel. With an Excel workbook open in your browser, click the Switch Ribbons icon (a tiny up arrow) at the far right of the Ribbon to see the simplified Ribbon. To change it back, click the Switch Ribbons icon (now a tiny down arrow) again.

IDG

In the simplified Ribbon, all the commands are still there for each tab, but only the most commonly used ones are visible. Click the three-dot icon at the far right to show the rest of the commands in a drop-down menu.

This is likely how the simplified Ribbon will work in Excel for Windows — if it ever arrives in the desktop app.

Search to get tasks done quickly

Excel has never been the most user-friendly of applications, and it has so many powerful features it can be tough to keep track of them all. In Excel 2016, Microsoft made it easier with an enhanced search feature called Tell Me, which put even buried tools in easy reach. Now Microsoft has renamed the feature Search, but it works the same way.

To use it, click in the Search box — it’s above the Ribbon in the green title area. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q.) Then type in a task you want to do, such as create a PivotTable. You’ll get a menu showing potential matches for the task. In this instance, the top result is a direct link to the form for creating a PivotTable — select it and you’ll start creating the PivotTable right away, without having to go to the Ribbon’s Insert tab first.

IDG

If you’d like more information about your task, the final items that appear in the menu let you select from related Help topics.

Even if you consider yourself a spreadsheet jockey, it’s worth your while to try out the enhanced search function. It’s a big time-saver, and far more efficient than hunting through the Ribbon to find a command. Also useful is that it remembers the features you’ve previously clicked on in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That makes sure that tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach. And it puts tasks you rarely do within easy reach as well.

One last note: The search box isn’t limited to searching for tasks. You can also use it to look up word definitions using Bing, and users with Microsoft 365/Office 365 business accounts can use it to search for company contacts or for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint.

You can also now use the search box to do a general internet search using the new Bing search capabilities, although I’ve found this feature to be not fully baked yet. For example, when I did a search on “What is France’s GDP,” it gave me the answer, but when I asked “What is GDP” it gave no answer. So it’s worth trying out, but not relying on.

IDG

Note, too, that you’ll get different answers using the search box than you do using the Smart Lookup feature, described below.

Use Smart Lookup for online research

Another feature, Smart Lookup, lets you do research while you’re working on a spreadsheet. Right-click a cell with a word or group of words in it, and from the menu that appears, select Smart Lookup.

When you do that, Excel uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine to do a web search on the word or words, then displays definitions, any related Wikipedia entries, and other results from the web in the Search pane that appears on the right. Click any result link to open the full page in a browser. If you want to browse files on your computer related to the word or words, click the Files button, and if you want to search for related media (photos, graphics, videos, etc.) click the Media button.

IDG

Smart Lookup does a good job finding specific information, such as the inflation rate in France in 2020, steel output in the US, or more generic information such as financial terms. You can look up anything, not just terms related to finances or numbers. So if you need to find out Charles Dickens’ birthday, it’ll find that as well.

Note that in order to use Smart Lookup in Excel or any other Office app, you might first need to enable Microsoft’s intelligent services feature, which collects your search terms and some content from your spreadsheets and other documents. (If you’re concerned about privacy, you’ll need to weigh whether the privacy hit is worth the convenience of doing research from right within the app.) If you haven’t enabled it, you’ll see a screen when you click Smart Lookup asking you to turn it on. Once you do so, it will be turned on across all your Office applications.

Explore Excel’s advanced chart types

Spreadsheets aren’t just about raw data — they’re about charts as well. Charts are great for visualizing and presenting data, and for gaining insights from it. To that end, Microsoft has introduced a number of advanced chart types over the past several years, including most notably a histogram (frequently used in statistics), a “waterfall” that’s effective at showing running financial totals, and a hierarchical treemap that helps you find patterns in data. Note that the new charts are available only if you’re working in an .xlsx document. If you use the older .xls format, you won’t find them.

To see all the charts, put your cursor in a cell or group of cells that contains data, select Insert > Recommended Charts and click the All Charts tab. You’ll find the newer charts, mixed in with the older ones. Select any to create the chart.

IDG

These are the new chart types:

Treemap. This chart type creates a hierarchical view of your data, with top-level categories (or tree branches) shown as rectangles, and with subcategories (or sub-branches) shown as smaller rectangles grouped inside the larger ones. Thus, you can easily compare the sizes of top-level categories and subcategories in a single view. For instance, a bookstore can see at a glance that it brings in more revenue from 1st Readers, a subcategory of Children’s Books, than for the entire Non-fiction top-level category.

IDG

Sunburst. This chart type also displays hierarchical data, but in a multi-level pie chart. Each level of the hierarchy is represented by a circle. The innermost circle contains the top-level categories, the next circle out shows subcategories, the circle after that subsubcategories and so on.

Sunbursts are best for showing the relationships among categories and subcategories, while treemaps are better at showing the relative sizes of categories and subcategories.

IDG

Waterfall. This chart type is well-suited for visualizing financial statements. It displays a running total of the positive and negative contributions toward a final net value.

IDG

Histogram. This kind of chart shows frequencies within a data set. It could, for example, show the number of books sold in specific price ranges in a bookstore.

IDG

Pareto. This chart, also known as a sorted histogram, contains bars as well as a line graph. Values are represented in descending order by bars. The cumulative total percentage of each bar is represented by a rising line. In the bookstore example, each bar could show a reason for a book being returned (defective, priced incorrectly, and so on). The chart would show, at a glance, the primary reasons for returns, so a bookstore owner could focus on those issues.

Note that the Pareto chart does not show up when you select Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts. To use it, first select the data you want to chart, then select Insert > Insert Statistic Chart, and under Histogram, choose Pareto.

IDG

Box & Whisker. This chart, like a histogram, shows frequencies within a data set but provides for a deeper analysis than a histogram. For example, in a bookstore it could show the distribution of prices of different genres of books. In the example shown here, each “box” represents the first to third quartile of prices for books in that genre, while the “whiskers” (the lines extending up and down from the box) show the upper and lower range of prices. Outliers that are priced outside the whiskers are shown as dots, the median price for each genre is shown with a horizontal line across the box, and the mean price is shown with an x.

IDG

Funnel. This chart type is useful when you want to display values at multiple stages in a process. A funnel chart can show the number of sales prospects at every stage of a sales process, for example, with prospects at the top for the first stage, qualified prospects underneath it for the second stage, and so on, until you get to the final stage, closed sales. Generally, the values in funnel charts decrease with each stage, so the bars in the chart look like a funnel.

IDG

When creating the data for a funnel chart, use one column for the stages in the process you’re charting, and a second column for the values for each stage. Once you’ve done that, to create the chart, select the data, then select Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts > Funnel.

Map. Map charts do exactly what you think they should: They let you compare data across different geographical regions, such as countries, regions, states, counties, or postal codes. Excel will automatically recognize the regions and create a map that visualizes the data.

iDG

To create a map chart, select the data you want to chart, then select Insert > Maps, then select the map chart. Note that in some instances, Excel might have a problem creating the map — for example, if there are multiple locations with the same name as one that you’re mapping. If that occurs, you’ll have to add one or more columns with details about the locations. If, say, you’re charting towns in the United Kingdom, you would have to include columns for the county and country each town is located in.

Use AutoSave to provide a safety net as you work

If you’re worried that you’ll lose your work on a worksheet because you don’t constantly save it, you’ll welcome the AutoSave feature. It automatically saves your files for you, so you won’t have to worry about system crashes, power outages, Excel crashes and similar problems. It only works only on documents stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. It won’t work with files saved in the older .xls format or files you save to your hard drive.

AutoSave is a vast improvement over the previous the AutoRecover feature built into Excel. AutoRecover doesn’t save your files in real time; instead, every several minutes it saves an AutoRecover file that you can try to recover after a crash. It doesn’t always work, though — for example, if you don’t properly open Excel after the crash, or if the crash doesn’t meet Microsoft’s definition of a crash. In addition, Microsoft notes, “AutoRecover is only effective for unplanned disruptions, such as a power outage or a crash. AutoRecover files are not designed to be saved when a logoff is scheduled or an orderly shutdown occurs.” And the files aren’t saved in real time, so you’ll likely lose several minutes of work even if all goes as planned.

AutoSave is turned on by default in Excel for Microsoft 365 .xlsx workbooks stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. To turn it off (or back on again) for a workbook, use the AutoSave slider on the top left of the screen. If you want AutoSave to be off for all files by default, select File > Options > Save and uncheck the box marked AutoSave files stored in the Cloud by default on Excel.

Using AutoSave may require some rethinking of your workflow. Many people are used to creating new worksheets based on existing ones by opening the existing file, making changes to it, and then using Save As to save the new version under a different name, leaving the original file intact. Be warned that doing this with AutoSave enabled will save your changes in the original file. Instead, Microsoft suggests opening the original file and immediately selecting File > Save a Copy (which replaces Save As when AutoSave is enabled) to create a new version.

If AutoSave does save unwanted changes to a file, you can always use the Version History feature described below to roll back to an earlier version.

Review or restore earlier versions of a spreadsheet

There’s an extremely useful feature hiding in the title bar in Excel for Microsoft 365: You can use Version History to go back to previous versions of a file, review them, compare them side-by-side with your existing version, and copy and paste from an older file to your existing one. You can also restore an entire old version.

To do it, click the file name at the top of the screen in an open file. A drop-down menu appears. Click Version History, and the Version History pane appears on the right side of the screen with a list of the previous versions of the file, including the time and date they were saved. (Alternatively, you can select the File tab on the Ribbon, click Info from the menu on the left, and then click the Version History button.)

IDG

In the Version History pane, click Open version under any older version, and that version appears as a read-only version in a new window. Scroll through the version and copy any content you want, then paste it into the latest version of the file. To restore the old version, overwriting the current one, click the Restore button.

Collaborate in real time

For those who frequently collaborate with others, a welcome feature in Excel for Microsoft 365 is real-time collaboration that lets people work on spreadsheets together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.”

Note that in order to use co-authoring, the spreadsheet must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, and you must be logged into your Microsoft 365 account. Also, co-authoring works in Excel only if you have AutoSave turned on. To do it, choose the On option on the AutoSave slider at the top left of the screen.

To share a document so you can collaborate on it with others: first open it, then click the Share button on the upper-right of the Excel screen. The “Send link” window pops up. Here you can send an email with a link where others can access the document.

IDG

Enter the email address of the person with whom you want to share in the text box. Enter multiple addresses, separated by commas, if you want to share the workbook with multiple people.

One feature I found particularly useful when adding email addresses: As you type, Excel looks through your corporate or personal address book and lists the names and addresses of contacts who match the text you’ve input. Click the address you want to add. This not only saves you a bit of time but helps make sure you don’t incorrectly type in addresses.

Next, decide whether anyone with the document link can access it, or only those whose email addresses you enter. If you see the text “Anyone with the link can edit” near the top of the pane, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Specific people on the screen that appears. Similarly, if “Specific people” appears above the email addresses, you can change that by clicking it, then choosing Anyone with the link can edit from the screen that appears. (If you use a business, enterprise, or education edition of Office, your IT department may have set up different sharing permissions on these two screens, such as an option to allow anyone within your organization to edit the document.)

On this second screen you can also set the document to read-only for everybody, or allow everybody to edit it. In the “Other settings” section, click the down arrow and choose either Can edit, which allows full editing, or Can view, which is read-only. If you want to give certain people editing privileges and others view-only privileges, you can send two separate invitations with different rights selected.

IDG

On this screen you can also set an expiration date after which people won’t be able to access the file, and you can set a password so that only people who have the password can access it. When you’ve made your selections, click Apply.

Back in the main “Send link” screen, you can send a message along with the link by typing it into the Message box. Then click Send. An email is sent to all the recipients with a link they can click to open the document.

(If you’d rather send recipients a copy of the file as a Word document or PDF instead of a link, and thus not allow real-time collaboration, click Send a copy at the bottom of the “Send link” screen.)

There’s another way to share a file stored in a personal OneDrive for collaboration: In the “Copy link” area at the bottom of the “Send link” pane, click Copy. When you do that, you can copy the link and send it to someone yourself via email. Note that you have the same options for setting access and editing permissions as you do if you have Excel send the link directly for you. Just click Anyone with the link can edit or Specific people below “Copy link,” and follow the instructions above.

IDG

To begin collaborating: When your recipients receive the email and click to open the spreadsheet, they’ll open it in the web version of Excel in a browser, not in the desktop version of Excel. They can begin editing immediately in the browser or else click Editing > Open in Desktop App on the upper right of the screen to work in the Excel desktop client. Excel for the web is less powerful and polished than the desktop client, but it works well enough for real-time collaboration.

As soon as any collaborators open the file, you’ll see a colored cursor that indicates their presence in the file. Each person collaborating gets a different color. Hover your cursor over a colored cell that indicates someone’s presence, and you’ll see their name. Once they begin editing the workbook, such as entering data or a formula into a cell, creating a chart, and so on, you see the changes they make in real time. Your cursor also shows up on their screen as a color, and they see the changes you make.

IDG

Collaboration includes the ability to make comments in a file, inside individual cells. To do it, right-click a cell, select New Comment and type in your comment. Everyone collaborating can see that a cell has a comment in it — it’s indicated by a small colored notch appearing in the upper right of the cell. The color matches the person’s collaboration color.

To see someone’s comment in a cell, hover your cursor over the cell or put your cursor in the cell and you’ll see the comment, the name of the person who made the comment, and a Reply box you can use to send a reply. You can also click the Comments button on the upper right of the screen to open the Comments pane, which lists every comment by every person. Click any comment to jump to the cell it’s in. You can also reply when you click a comment in the pane.

IDG

Take advantage of linked data

Excel for Microsoft 365 has a new feature that Microsoft calls “linked data types.” Essentially, they’re cells that are connected to an online source (Bing) that automatically updates their information — for example, a company’s current stock price. As I write this, there are nearly two dozen linked data types, including not just obvious data types such as stocks, geography, and currencies, but many others, including chemistry, cities, anatomy, food, yoga, and more.

To use them, type the items you want to track into cells in a single column. For stocks, for example, you can type in a series of stock ticker symbols, company names, fund names, etc. After that, select the cells, then on the Ribbon’s Data tab, select Stocks in the Data Types section in the middle. (If you had typed in geographic names such as countries, states, or cities, you would instead select Geography.) Excel automatically converts the text in each cell into the matching data source — in our example, into the company name and stock ticker.

Excel also adds a small icon to the left edge of each cell identifying it as a linked cell. Click any icon and a data card will pop up showing all sorts of information about the kind of information you’ve typed in.  For instance, a stock data card shows stock-related information such as current price, today’s high and low, and 52-week high and low, as well as general company information including industry and number of employees. A location card shows the location’s population, capital, GDP, and so on.

You can build out a table using data from the data card. To do so, select the cells again, and an Insert Data button appears. Click the button, then select the information you want to appear, such as Price for the current stock price, or Population for the population of a geographic region.

IDG

Excel will automatically add a column to the right populated with the latest information for each item you’re tracking, and will keep it updated. You can click the Insert Data button multiple times to keep adding columns to the right for different types of data from the item’s data card.  It’s helpful to add column headers so you know what each column is showing.

Other new features to check out

Spreadsheet pros will be pleased with several new features and tools built into Excel for Microsoft 365, from a quick data analysis tool to an advanced 3D mapping platform.

Get an instant data analysis

If you’re looking to analyze data in a spreadsheet, the new Quick Analysis tool will help. Highlight the cells you want to analyze, then move your cursor to the lower right-hand corner of what you’ve highlighted. A small icon of a spreadsheet with a lightning bolt on it appears. Click it and you’ll get a variety of tools for performing instant analysis of your data. For example, you can use the tool to highlight the cells with a value greater than a specific number, get the numerical average for the selected cells, or create a chart on the fly.

IDG

Translate text

You can translate text from right within Excel. Highlight the cell whose text you want translated, then select Review > Translate. A Translator pane opens on the right. Excel will detect the words’ language at the top of the pane; you then select the language you want it translated to below. If Excel can’t detect the language of the text you chose or detects it incorrectly, you can override it.

Easily find worksheets that have been shared with you

It’s easy to forget which worksheets others have shared with you. In Excel for Microsoft 365 there’s an easy way to find them: Select File > Open > Shared with Me to see a list of them all. Note that this only works with OneDrive (both Personal and Business) and SharePoint Online. You’ll also need to be signed into you Microsoft or work or school account.

Predict the future with Forecast Sheet

Using the new Forecast Sheet function, you can generate forecasts built on historical data. If, for example, you have a worksheet showing past book sales by date, Forecast Sheet can predict future sales based on past ones.

To use the feature, you must be working in a worksheet that has time-based historical data. Put your cursor in one of the data cells, go to the Data tab on the Ribbon and select Forecast Sheet from the Forecast group toward the right. On the screen that appears, you can select various options such as whether to create a line or bar chart and what date the forecast should end. Click the Create button, and a new worksheet will appear showing your historical and predicted data and the forecast chart. (Your original worksheet will be unchanged.)

IDG

Explore Excel’s new functions

Excel for Microsoft 365 has a number of new functions for doing calculations. TEXTJOIN and CONCAT let you combine text strings from ranges of cells with or without using a delimiter separating each item, such as a comma. You only need to refer to the range and specify a delimiter, and Excel takes it from there. Two other functions, IFS and SWITCH, help specify a series of conditions — for example, when using nested IF functions. And two other new functions, MAXIFS and MINIFS, make it easier to filter and calculate data in a number of different ways.

For details about how to use these six functions, head to Microsoft’s helpful “6 new Excel functions that simplify your formula editing experience” post.

An even newer function lets you import a stock’s history. As discussed earlier in this story, Excel has for some time let you dynamically update the latest stock prices via the Stocks data type. It now allows you to get a history of stock prices as well, via the STOCKHISTORY function. You’ll find directions for using this function in Microsoft’s “Announcing STOCKHISTORY” post.

Manage data for analysis with Get & Transform

This feature is not entirely new to Excel. Formerly known as Power Query, it was made available as a free add-in to Excel 2013 and worked only with the PowerPivot features in Excel Professional Plus. Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence software offers similar functionality.

Now called Get & Transform, it’s a business intelligence tool that lets you pull in, combine, and shape data from wide variety of local and cloud sources. These include Excel workbooks, CSV files, SQL Server and other databases, Azure, Active Directory, and many others. You can also use data from public sources including Wikipedia.

IDG

You’ll find the Get & Transform tools together in a group on the Data tab in the Ribbon. For more about using these tools, see Microsoft’s “Getting Started with Get & Transform in Excel.”

Make a 3D map

Before Excel 2016, Power Map was a popular free 3D geospatial visualization add-in for Excel. Now it’s free, built into Excel for Microsoft 365, and has been renamed 3D Maps. With it, you can plot geographic and other information on a 3D globe or map. You’ll need to first have data suitable for mapping, and then prepare that data for 3D Maps.

Those steps are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s advice from Microsoft about how to get and prepare data for 3D Maps. Once you have properly prepared data, open the spreadsheet and select Insert > 3D Map > Open 3D Maps. Then click Enable from the box that appears. That turns on the 3D Maps feature. For details on how to work with your data and customize your map, head to the Microsoft tutorial “Get started with 3D Maps.”

If you don’t have data for mapping but just want to see firsthand what a 3D map is like, you can download sample data created by Microsoft. The screenshot shown here is from Microsoft’s Dallas Utilities Seasonal Electricity Consumption Simulation demo. When you’ve downloaded the workbook, open it up, select Insert > 3D Map > Open 3D Maps and click the map to launch it.

IDG

Automate tasks

If you have OneDrive for Business and use Excel with a commercial or educational Microsoft 365 license, you can automate tasks with the new Automate tab. You’ll be able to create and edit scripts with the Code Editor, run automated tasks with a button click, and share the script with co-workers. See Microsoft’s “Office Scripts in Excel” documentation for details.

Insert data from a picture into Excel

There are times you may find data inside an image file that you’d like to get into Excel. Typically, you’ll have to input the data from it manually. There’s now a way to have Excel convert the information on the image into data for a worksheet.

In the Get & Transform Data group on the Data tab, click the From Picture dropdown and select Picture From File to choose the image you want to grab data from, or Picture from Clipboard to take a screenshot of an image on your PC and then import the data. For more details, see Microsoft’s “Insert data from picture” support page.  

Use keyboard shortcuts

Here’s one last productivity tip: If you memorize a handful of keyboard shortcuts for common tasks in Excel, you can save a great deal of time over hunting for the right command to click on. See “Handy Excel keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac” for our favorites.

And don’t forget to download our Excel for Microsoft 365 Ribbon quick reference guide, which explores the most useful commands on each Ribbon tab and provides keyboard shortcuts for each.

This article was originally published in August 2019 and most recently updated in April 2023.