Customizing Excel

• By Bill Jelen
• 4/6/2019

Getting Help with a Setting

Many settings appear with a small i icon. If you hover the mouse near this icon, Excel displays a super ToolTip for the setting. The ToolTip explains what happens when you choose the setting. It also provides some tips about what you need to be aware of when you turn on the setting. For example, the ToolTip in Figure 3.6 shows information about the calculation settings. It also explains that you should use the F9 key to invoke a manual calculation.

New Options in Excel 2019

Excel 2019 offers several new settings:

• Office Intelligent Services is found on the General category. This Office-365 exclusive feature will send up to 250,000 cells of your worksheet to a Microsoft Artificial Intelligence application for analysis. You must opt-in to use this feature in Options and then invoke the feature using the Insights command on the Insert menu.

• Enable LinkedIn Features is found in the General category. Microsoft purchased LinkedIn, and they added features to allow LinkedIn profile information to appear in Outlook and Word. There are not any LinkedIn features available in Excel (yet), so you must wonder why they added this option in Excel.

• Default PivotTable Layout is found in the new Data category. Change the default layout for all future pivot tables. Several items in the new Data category were moved to the Data category from the Advanced category.

• Disable Automatic Grouping Of Date/Time Columns In A Pivot Table is found in the Data category. One of the highly touted features in Excel 2016 was that any date field added to a pivot table would be rolled up to years and months. Some people hated it, and so now there is a checkbox to turn it off.

• Show Legacy Data Import Wizards is a series of seven choices in the new Data category. The Power Query tools debuted in Excel 2016 on the Data tab of the ribbon. These tools became so popular, Microsoft decided to remove the old Get External Data group from the ribbon, but some people had specific reasons why they liked the old icons. You can now add those old icons back by choosing From Access, From Web, From Text, From SQL Server, From OData Data Feed, From XML Data Import, or From Data Connection. If you choose something from this area, it will appear hidden on the ribbon. Look in Data, Get Data, Legacy Wizards.

• AutoSave OneDrive And SharePoint Online Files By Default On Excel is the first item in the Save category of Excel Options. A small percentage of people need to have many people work in the same workbook at the same time. A large percentage of people who don’t need this feature quickly hated that Excel was saving their file after every change. You can globally turn AutoSave Off or On using this setting. I recommend leaving it off. Then, for the workbooks that you need to edit with other people, you can turn it on.

• Show Data Loss Warning When Editing Comma Delimited Files (*.csv) is found in the Save category. Excel used to nag you whenever you opened a file in CSV format. If you did not save the file as XLSX, it would warn you that you are about to lose formulas and formatting. A lot of people were tired of the nagging, and Microsoft turned off the nagging by default. If you need to be nagged, you can turn it back on here.

• The ability to save Checked Out files To Server Drafts was removed from the Save category. A Learn More hyperlink in Excel Options explains why.

• The Ease Of Access category is new in Excel 2019. You can choose to Provide Feedback With Sound and choose a Modern or Classic sound scheme. The new part is the Modern sound scheme. The annoying Classic Sound Scheme was previously the only choice in the Advanced category. You can turn off Animations. The choice to control if Screen Tips are shown is repeated here from the General category. You can set the Default Font Size used in the document. You can choose to turn off the calculation Function Screen Tips.

• Use Pen To Select and Interact By Default is new in the Advanced category. If you prefer using a touchscreen, you can change the default behavior of touch.

Using AutoRecover Options

For many versions, Excel periodically saves a copy of your work every 10 minutes. If your computer crashes, the recovery pane offers to let you open the last AutoRecovered version of the file. This feature is sure to save you from retyping data that might have otherwise been lost.

Another painful situation occurs when you do not save changes and then close Excel. Yes, Excel asks if you want to save changes for each open document, but this question usually pops up at 5:00 p.m. when you are in a hurry to get out of the office. If you are thinking about what you need to do after work and not paying attention to which files are still open, you might click No to the first document and then click No again and again without noticing that the fifth open document was one that should have been saved.

Another scenario involves leaving an Excel file open overnight only to discover that Windows Update decided to restart the computer at 3 a.m. After being burned a dozen times, you can change the behavior of Windows Update to stop doing this. However, if Windows Update closed Excel without saving your documents, you can lose those AutoRecovered documents.

A setting introduced in Excel 2010 has Excel save the last AutoRecovered version of each open file when you close without saving. This setting is on the Save category of Excel Options and is called Keep The Last AutoSaved Version If I Close Without Saving.

Controlling Image Sizes

An Image Size & Quality section appears in the Advanced category. Most people add a photo to dress up the cover page of a document. However, you probably don’t need an 8-megapixel image being saved in the workbook. By default, Excel compresses the image before saving the file. You can control the target output size using the drop-down menu in Excel options. Choices include 96ppi, 150ppi, and 220ppi. The 96ppi setting will look fine on your display. Use 220ppi for images you will print. If you want to keep your images at the original size, you can select the Do Not Compress Images In File setting.

You should also understand the Discard Editing Data check box. Suppose that you insert an image in your workbook and then crop out part of the photograph. If you do not enable Discard Editing Data, someone else can come along and uncrop your photo. This can be an embarrassing situation—just ask the former TechTV co-host who discovered certain bits of photographs were still hanging around after she cropped them out.

Working with Protected View for Files Originating from the Internet

Starting in Excel 2010, files from the Internet or Outlook initially open in protected mode. This mode gives you a chance to look at the workbook and formulas without having anything malicious happen. Unfortunately, you cannot view the macro code while the workbook is in protected view.

If you only want to view or print the workbook, protected mode works great. One statistic says that 40% of the time, people simply open a document and never make changes to it.

After you click Enable Editing, Excel will skip protected mode the next time you open the file.

Working with Trusted Document Settings

By default, Excel warns you about all sorts of things. If you open a workbook with macros, links, external data connections, or even the new WEBSERVICE function, a message bar appears above the worksheet to let you know that Excel disabled those “threats.”

If you declare a folder on your hard drive to be a trusted folder, you can open those documents without Excel warning you about the items. Visit File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Trusted Locations to set up a trusted folder.

Starting in Excel 2010, if you open a file from your hard drive and enable the content, Excel automatically enables that content the next time. The inherent problem here is that if you open a file and discover the macros are bad, you will not want those macros to open the next time automatically. There is no way to untrust a single document other than deleting, renaming, or moving it. Instead, you have to go to the Trusted Documents category of the Trust Center where you can choose to clear the entire list of trusted documents.