Course info

In this presentation, author and Excel expert David H. Ringstrom, CPA, will demystify some of Excel’s built-in safety nets and nuanced behaviors that can make or break your workflow. You'll learn how to recover unsaved workbooks, make sense of the AutoRecover feature, and understand where OneDrive fits into Excel’s autosave ecosystem. David walks you through how to tweak recovery settings to minimize data loss and shares practical advice for navigating Excel’s sometimes-unpredictable handling of unsaved files. Whether you’ve ever closed a workbook too soon or been baffled by recovery prompts, this session equips you with strategies to keep your work intact and your confidence high. 

David is the author of “Microsoft Excel 365 for Dummies”, “Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures”, and has written or co-authored six other books. He demonstrates every technique at least twice: first, on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps, and second, in the subscription-based Excel for Microsoft 365. David draws your attention to any differences in Excel 2021, 2019 or 2016 during the presentation and in his detailed handouts. The handouts include an Excel workbook with most of the examples he uses during his demonstrations. Most features and functions work in Excel for Mac as well but expect differences. 

Excel for Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based product that receives periodic feature updates. Conversely, perpetually licensed versions have year numbers in their names and do not receive any feature updates.

Who should attend:

Professionals seeking to use Microsoft Excel more effectively.

Topics typically covered:

• Tweaking Excel’s AutoRecover settings to raise the odds of recovering your work after an Excel crash.
• Learning the nuances of circular references in Excel.
• Hiding and displaying cell comments and masse as well as locating all cells that contain comments.
• Creating keyboard shortcuts for repetitive Excel tasks.
• Understanding the nuances of Excel’s Allow Editing Directly in Cells option, such as being able to edit cell comments with a double-click.
• Understanding Excel’s Freeze Panes feature.
• Preventing chart resize issues by using Excel tables.
• Accessing files closed without saving as well as interim back-ups Excel makes while you're working in a workbook.
• Taming your scrollbars by resetting the used range of a worksheet manually or with a macro.
• Identifying the feature conflict that arises when you utilize tables within Excel workbooks.
• Avoiding frustration by understanding the differences between Enter and Edit modes.
• Change the cursor direction in Excel to Right instead of Down to facilitate faster data entry.