I’ve been using Excel for exactly thirty years - I still have a Macintosh floppy disk with MS Excel version 0.9 – so you’d think I know my way around Excel pretty well.
Yes I do, but that’s not to say that I don’t still learn something new. Pivot tables? I remember my dad trying to explain the concept to me twenty-five years ago but I never understood them well enough to use them, until I changed jobs in 2010 and it became a focus.
Today though, I came across something that blew my mind, and that was not because it’s complicated but because it’s so obvious and yet invisible:
In my current job, I am regularly confronted with huge ugly formulas that are incredibly difficult to read, and not even Excel’s color-coded parentheses can save me:
I came across this serendipitous Excel tip that basically reveals that Alt+Enter works in formulas, too! Let’s try that:
I know and use Alt+Enter in text fields all the time but I had no idea that it works in formulas, too. Wow!
“Why wouldn’t it,” you say, and you’re right – but I just never thought of trying that. This adds one more trick to my toolbox that I’ll probably never forget.