Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at Excel Options which is probably the most important
aspect of Microsoft Excel, certainly in terms of setting up to suite the way that you work
and to suite your own installation.
If you’re new to Excel there’s what may seem like a baffling array of options that
you make decisions about.
But in fact with Excel Options, provided you’ve got one or two of the simplest ones in place
first and I’m going to point those out to you now.
Then, the others you can deal with as you come to them and during the rest of the course
I’ll refer you back to Excel Options.
So first of all, let’s look at how we access the Excel Options.
Well let’s go into Backstage View and in Backstage View right down at the bottom, Options.
Now the Excel Options is really a big dialog box and you should know by now that if you
want some help at any point, you’ve got the link through here, the question mark that
takes you through to Help.
And the dialog box is arranged into a set of Pages.
So we have a General Page, we have a Formulas Page, Proofing, Save, Languages, and so on.
Now some of these I’m going to talk about later on in the course, but I want to talk
about a few of the main straightforward settings to get you started.
And let’s go back to the General Page first.
Now three-quarters of the way down that page there’s a section marked “Personalize
your copy of Microsoft Office” and in there you should have your own user name.
This user name will be used to annotate the workbooks that you create.
And it can be used in a number of other situations to do with making changes to workbooks and
so on.
But either put your own name or a sort of code name or something in there.
And the other thing you can do here, I’m not going to go into this in detail now but
you might like to look into it, is that you can choose the Office Theme and Office Background
that you want to use.
Now these basically relate to a common approach, a common Theme throughout your use of many
of the Office 2013 components.
I’ve got mine set here at the defaults.
Now when we talked about Help earlier on, I didn’t really talk about what are called
screen tips.
Let me hover over one of the rows in the first section on the General Page of the Excel Options
and what pops up there is what’s called a screen tip.
It says “Show mini toolbar on selection.”
That’s Bold.
That’s the tip.
And then below that the other text is referred to as a deature description.
Now this can be very useful to have these screen tips and feature descriptions appearing
whenever you’re using Excel, particularly when you’re new to Excel it will tell you
what a particular command, what a particular button does, and then also give it a little
bit more of a detailed description of what it does.
Now after you’ve been using Excel for a while, you may not need those screen tips
and this first section on the General Page let’s you switch them off or partially off.
If you look at this drop down it says, Screen Tip Style.
Show feature descriptions in screen tips.
That’s the sort of full on version of screen tips.
If you said I don’t want the feature descriptions, you’ll only get the tip, the title if you
like.
And if you select don’t show screen tips, you won’t get anything at all.
Now I’m going to choose the middle option, so don’t show feature descriptions.
Any changes you make in Excel Options only actually get executed when you click the OK.
So let’s click on OK.
I’ve got a little workbook open here.
Let me hover over the command here.
It says Bold.
It only says Bold.
It tells me what that command is.
It’s the command to make text Bold.
Let me go into Backstage View again, back into the Options, the General Page.
Now let me go back to the original setting; Show feature descriptions in screen tips.
Click on OK again, hover that same button.
Now it says Bold and the rather helpful text, Make your text bold.
Now in this case perhaps that’s not a particularly helpful feature description, but sometimes
the feature descriptions are quite detailed and can really help explain how something
works or what it does in a little bit more detail.
So let’s go back into the Options again and I’m going to leave it at Show feature
descriptions in screen tips.
When you’ve been using Excel for a while, you may find that you don’t need the feature
descriptions.
You may find that you don’t need the screen tips at all.
So this is how you switch them off.
So I want to talk now about this section, the second section that says “When creating
new workbooks.”
You may be familiar with the concept of themes in Microsoft Office or maybe Microsoft Excel
and we’re going to talk about themes later on.
But with the theme that is applied to new workbooks, there will be a default body font
and at the moment, the default font for new Excel workbooks is whatever that body font
is in the selected theme.
The font size is set to 11.
So that means that when I create a new workbook, the workbook will have as its font the body
font for the theme that’s in use and the font size will be 11.
If I would always like the font to be something different, then I can use the drop down here
to choose a different font from the theme such as the headings font or a specific font.
Now the list of fonts on this machine is, there are hundreds of them now and nowadays
on a modern PC the number of fonts is getting to be absolutely huge.
It’s very difficult to choose between them there are so many.
But most people tend to finish up using a relatively small number of fonts.
So familiar fonts, things like Calibri and Times and so on will appear quite a lot.
I’m going to leave this one set at Body Font so that it matches the theme that’s
in use.
Another important option here is the default view, Normal View.
We’ll talk about that later.
And then we also have “Include this many sheets.”
For a very long time when you created a new workbook in Microsoft Excel, the convention
was to create three new sheets and that continued right up to the 2010 version.
In this new version, the default is just to create one sheet in a workbook when you create
a new workbook.
I leave mine set at one because I find that usually for most of the day to day work that
I do in Excel I do only need one worksheet.
Although in many cases the number of worksheets can really become quite big.
And I have worked on workbooks with literally dozens of worksheets in them.
So, you should set your defaults there to what suites you.
It may well be that to get started it’s best to leave them just as they are.
And one other useful little setting on the General Page right at the bottom, “Show
the Start Screen when this application starts.”
The Start Screen is the one that we’ve always seen so far, the one with the template images
on it and so on, with the Recent list on the left.
If you want to go straight into Excel without that uncheck this box, click on OK to save
the change, and next time you start Excel you won’t see that Start Screen.
Now I’m going to come back to the Formulas Page and the Proofing Page later.
Let’s go to the Save Page and there’s one particular setting on here that I’d
like to point out to you.
When you’re saving workbooks, it’s usually a bit of a struggle to find exactly where
you’re going to put it.
We’re going to use SkyDrive later, but for the moment we’re mostly going to be using
your computer.
You can say to Excel using this option roughly in the middle of this Page what’s the default
local file location to save workbooks to.
Now on a Windows PC, this is Windows 8 remember, the default locations tend to be your Documents
folder within your user area on the C: Drive.
So in my case that location is C:, Users, TobyA, Documents.
You can set that to anything you like really, provided you have access to it.
So if you set that here, then you’re going to find that every time you come to save a
new workbook it’ll go straight to that folder, it’ll probably save you a little bit of
hunting around.
So that’s a useful thing to set as well.
And just above that there’s a checkbox that says “Save to computer by default.”
So by default it will come up with offering to save a workbook, a new workbook, to your
computer which again can save you a little bit of scrambling around.
For instance, if you’re not planning to use SkyDrive and you almost always save to
your computer that’s a good option to set as well.
So now let’s move to the next page.
Again, very important and this is Language.
Now depending on your locale, you’ll have the Language set here accordingly.
My default Language is English United Kingdom and I probably, in a typical working week,
do roughly half and half English UK and English U.S.
I don’t routinely work in any other languages, so I only have those two setup.
Most people will only have one language setup and to some extent people would say, well,
what’s the difference between English UK and English U.S.?
Well believe me there’s quite a big difference.
But you will normally have just your default language setup and if you use another one
it’s pretty easy to add another additional language there.
If you look at the drop down below this main box here the list of languages is extremely
long.
And those languages are supported very well in Excel.
So basically make sure you have the right language set and if there’s more than one
language, make sure you’ve got the correct language set as your default.
It’s quite straightforward to change the default.
If for instance I clicked on here to English United States, I could use a button at the
right to set that as my default language.
Similarly if I wanted to remove that language, there’s a Remove button on the right.
So there are a few more pages and we’re going to come back to these a little bit later
on.
In the next section, we’re going to be looking at the Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar.
So I’ll come back to those in a while.
The Advanced Options, some of those will be coming back to later on as well.
And then we have a page on add-ins which really caters for additional facilities that you
can install.
And then also in terms of protection and security, we have a Trust Center Page that we’ll also
look at later.
So we’ve looked at the most important Excel Options for now.
I hope they make some sense.
You need to go through the pages that I’ve highlighted and make sure that you’ve got
them set correctly on your installation of Excel and I’ll see you in the next section.