Tips

Unfortunately, it is impossible to check spelling in Excel like we do this in Word, with underlining the misspelled words with red (if you know the way, please inform us!). Excel was designed mostly for numbers initially, and hence, spelling is not its strong point.

Nevertheless, spelling check is possible, of course, but with a help of Spelling dialog box. It is the standard way in all Microsoft Office programs.

To run the spelling check in Excel, click Review tab > Spelling, or just press F7. The ordinary Spelling dialog box opens, with standard options: Skip, Skip All, Add to Dictionary, Change, Change All, Cancel.

• If you want to check the content of a particular cell, select the cell and put the text cursor inside it by double clicking it, then run the spelling check.
• If you want to check the content of several cells, select them with SHIFT key, then run the spelling check.
• If you want to check the content of the entire spreadsheet, select a cell on it WITHOUT double clicking it and putting the text cursor inside, then run the spelling check. Please note that all comments, page headers, footers and graphics is checked as well.

Note: Excel doesn’t check spelling in cells that contain formulas.

When working in Excel, you sometimes need to copy the contents of the upper cell to the cell where the cursor is put. This operation is simple, it consists of four even more simple steps: 

• Move cursor to the upper cell
• Press CTRL+C (Copy)
• Move cursor back to lower cell 
• Press CTRL+V (Paste)

But when you need to do these steps many times, the operation becomes quite tedious.

The solution is very easy: use shortcut CTRL+D. The contents of the upper cell is duplicated immediately. You do not even need to move the cursor. Instead of performing four steps, you perform only one.

Similarly, if you need to copy the text from the left cell quickly, just press CTRL+R:

The usefulness of these two shortcuts grows even further when you need to duplicate the contents of a cell to several cells below. For example, if you need to copy the contents into 10 cells, select them all (including the cell to be duplicated):

Then press CTRL+D. All selected cells are filled with the contents of the very first cell:

CTRL+R command makes duplicating “to the right” in the similar way.

Shortcuts speed up your work. Ironically, these ones are the standard Excel shortcuts, but few people are aware of them. The only thing you should remember is: they do not work if a filter is applied on the Excel sheet.