Chapter III.4. Controlling Excel

In This Chapter

  • Copying and pasting in Excel

  • Moving and copying sheets

  • Taking pictures with Excel's camera

  • Nesting in Excel

  • Curing so-called errors

Excel has some unique behaviors that enable you to do special tasks. This chapter shows you how to take advantage of Excel's ability to take ordinary features and extend them so that you have more flexibility. You also end up getting so used to these features that you might wonder how you managed without them all this time! In fact, you can twist Excel into many positions, like a rubber band. This chapter is loaded with tips on how to get Excel to work (and stretch) in special ways.

Copying and Pasting

The first thing to consider when copying and pasting in Excel is to think about the nature of what you attempt to copy. Cells, cell ranges, and formulas are treated differently from other kinds of things, such as SmartArt and graphs. We start by copying cells, formulas, and ranges. After that, we see what happens when you copy other kinds of things.

Tip

If you're not familiar with SmartArt and graphs, flip to Book I to read more about these shared Office features.

Simply copying and pasting

If you're used to copying and pasting, you know that if you select some text and then copy and paste, the default settings paste the text, along with the text format — such as blue, bold, or italic.

Follow this simple example to copy and paste in Excel:

  1. Alternatively, you can press

  2. Alternatively, you can press

    When you paste the cell, ...

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