Here’s a cool time-saving trick that I stumbled across the other day – I was moving around some rows in a worksheet, following the usual routine of adding the space needed then completing the copy / cut and paste into the new space.
Unfortunately, this means a lot of steps… add the needed blank rows / columns / cells, copy or cut the data, paste the data and then, if it was a cut situation, go back and remove the empty space that I had created.
Not a difficult task, and yet a bit of a pain.
At any rate, I was working on moving things around when I accidentally got ahead of myself and copied the rows before I inserted a new location into which I could place them.
Much to my surprise when I clicked the Insert button on the Home tab of the Ribbon…
…I found that my rows were pasted at the same time the space was inserted!
Of course I began to explore what I could do with this and found that it worked with cut material – the cut data was moved to it’s new location and the empty cells that the move created were removed at the same time.
As I continued to check things out I discovered that the process worked with rows, columns and cells… so pretty much anything you’d need to work with.
When I attempted this with cells that had officially been converted to table form I found that Excel didn’t always like what I was trying to do – but with plain old cells in a worksheet things went better than I ever could have hoped for.
All I can say for that little accidental find is WOW! Talk about making your work more efficient, I don’t think it could get any better than that.
~ April
Idea sounds good. I’ll have to try it.
Please learn the difference between “its” and “it’s” and make this teacher happy.
In Excel 2003 you could do this by just right clicking where you wanted to insert or copy your rows. I wondered how to do it in Excel 2007. Thanks for the info.