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Excel Training

Hide an Excel formula and protect your workbook from unwanted changes

One problem with sharing workbooks is accidental changes to formulas – a small change can negatively effect a whole document.

How to hide a formula and stop unwanted changes

Right click on the cell that contains the formula.

Go to the Context menu and select Format Cells.  From here, click on Protection, and choose the Hidden tick box.  Remember, the formula isn’t protected until you activate protection.

Go to the Review tab and select Protect Sheet.  So now, when you look in the cell, the results of the formula will be shown, but the formula will no longer be visible in the formula bar (and safe from any accidental changes).

If you want to protect your Excel workbook, you can apply a password – this means that only the users you approve can access the workbook.

To apply a password to your workbook, click on File then select Info and Protect Workbook. You can then select Encrypt with password and choose your password.

You can protect more than just formulas – including formatting, columns, rows and much more.

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So many options to protect your data…

Protecting formulas are part of our formula for success at work…excel+course+london and to find more advanced skills take a look at https://www.stl-training.co.uk/microsoft/excel-training-london.php

Categories
Excel Training

Get more out of formulas in Excel using functions

It’s easy to fall into a habit, and manually type in a formula and copy and paste it within a worksheet. If so, you may not be getting the most out of the Formula tab on the Ribbon. From here, you can save yourself time by using Excel’s ready made formulas using Functions.

The Formulas tab has the regularly used calculations and set them up as functions in 12 different categories.  So you have these at your fingertips to apply to a range of cells that you specify.

The 12 categories include: financial, date and time, maths and trig, statistical, database, text, look up and reference, logical, information, engineering, cube and compatibility.

Each of these categories has a drop down list with a selection of common functions, ready for you to apply to your selected cells.

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The Formula tab has functions ready for you to apply.

For example, if you need to calculate the cost of loans, or interest, yield and depreciation, you can access these functions via the Financial Function.

If-then statements are in the Logical Functions – so you can analyse data setting up logical statements, setting out whether a value is true or false, or using AND or OR.

If you regularly want to work out averages, minimums, maximums, or interest rates, these are stored in the Statistical Functions.

To get the most of Excel’s functions, it is worth exploring what the Formulas tab has to offer.  An excellent way to find out more and learn how to use them is to attend a  Microsoft Excel training course, so you can see what is available and practise using them before using them on your own live data.  From Intermediate Excel to Advanced and beyond, our courses cover Formulas and Functions in more detail https://www.stl-training.co.uk/microsoft/excel-training-london.php