Written by Shahzaib Ali
Excel Tips for Beginners
My first real job out of college involved a lot of Excel. I knew this going in. What I didn’t know was that “knowing Excel” and “knowing how to click cells and type numbers into them” are two very different things, and I had accidentally claimed the latter while only being capable of the former.
The first time my manager asked me to “just do a quick VLOOKUP” on a vendor list, I nodded like I knew what that meant, went back to my desk, opened Excel, and quietly Googled “what is vlookup” for twenty minutes before producing something that was technically a VLOOKUP but also wrong in a way I didn’t catch until she did.
That was the moment I decided to actually learn Excel instead of just surviving it. What followed was months of YouTube videos, trial and error, genuinely embarrassing mistakes, and a few revelations that made me wish someone had just sat me down at the beginning and explained ten things clearly.
Here are those ten things.
Tip 1: Freeze Your Header Row Before You Do Anything Else
This sounds minor. It isn’t.
The moment you’re working with any spreadsheet longer than a screen, you’ll start scrolling down and immediately forget what each column means because the header row has disappeared off the top. You’ll either keep scrolling back up to check, or — more dangerously — you’ll start making assumptions about which column is which and enter data in the wrong place.
Freezing your header row keeps it visible no matter how far down you scroll.
How to do it: Click on row 2 (the row just below your headers). Go to View → Freeze Panes → Freeze Panes. That’s it. Now your header row stays fixed at the top and everything below it scrolls normally.
You can do the same for columns — if your first column has names or IDs you always want to see, click the column to the right of it, go to View → Freeze Panes → Freeze Panes, and that column stays locked while you scroll right.
I do this within the first minute of opening any new spreadsheet now. It’s automatic.
Tip 2: Ctrl + Z Is Your Safety Net — Use It Fearlessly
New Excel users are often terrified of doing something wrong because they’re not sure they can undo it. This fear makes them timid and slow. It’s unnecessary.
Excel’s undo history goes back dozens of steps. Ctrl + Z (Command + Z on Mac) will undo almost anything you’ve done, one step at a time, as far back as you need to go. Made a mess of your formatting? Ctrl + Z. Accidentally deleted a column? Ctrl + Z. Pasted something over data you needed? Ctrl + Z a few times.
The exceptions — things you generally can’t undo — are saving (though you can close without saving and reopen the last saved version), and some operations involving macros. For normal spreadsheet work, undo has your back.
Knowing this, really internalizing it, changes how you interact with Excel. You start trying things instead of overthinking them, which is how you actually get better.
Tip 3: Learn These Keyboard Shortcuts First (The Others Can Wait)
There are hundreds of Excel keyboard shortcuts. You don’t need to learn them. You need to learn these five, and they’ll cover the vast majority of your daily work.
Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V — Copy and paste. You know these. But in Excel specifically: when you paste a formula, it pastes the formula (adjusted for the new row/column), not just the result. If you want to paste only the values without the formula, use Ctrl + Shift + V or right-click → Paste Special → Values.
Ctrl + Arrow Keys — Jumps to the last filled cell in a direction. Press Ctrl + Down Arrow in a column of data and you jump to the bottom of the data instantly instead of scrolling. Hold Shift while doing this and you select everything in between. This one genuinely changed how fast I navigate spreadsheets.
Ctrl + Shift + End — Selects from your current cell to the last cell containing data in the entire sheet. Useful for quickly selecting a whole dataset.
F2 — Puts the selected cell into edit mode so you can modify the formula or text without clicking into it. Sounds trivial, saves a surprising amount of time.
Ctrl + Home / Ctrl + End — Jumps to the very first cell (A1) or the very last cell with data. Great for quickly orienting yourself in a large sheet.
Spend one afternoon just using these intentionally, and within a week they’ll be reflexive.
Tip 4: Understand the Difference Between a Value and a Formula
This confused me for longer than I’d like to admit.
When you type a number into a cell, that’s a value. It’s static. When you type =A1+B1, that’s a formula. It calculates and displays a result, but the underlying cell content is an instruction, not a number.
Why does this matter? A few reasons.
If you copy a formula cell and paste it somewhere else, Excel adjusts the cell references automatically. =A1+B1 in row 2, when pasted to row 3, becomes =A2+B2. This is called relative referencing and it’s usually what you want. But if you paste it to a completely different sheet or position and the references get messed up, your results will be wrong without any error message — they’ll just be quietly calculating the wrong cells.
Also: if you send a spreadsheet to someone and they delete a column your formulas depend on, those formulas will break. This is less of a concern when you’re just starting out, but knowing that formulas have dependencies will save you confusion later.
To see all the formulas in a sheet at once instead of their results, press Ctrl + ` (the backtick key, usually top-left of your keyboard below Escape). Press it again to go back. This is incredibly useful for auditing a spreadsheet you didn’t build yourself.
Tip 5: SUM, AVERAGE, and COUNT Are Just the Beginning — But Learn Them Well First
The formula every beginner knows is =SUM(A1:A10). And that’s a great starting point. But a lot of people don’t know the small variations that make these formulas much more flexible.
SUMIF — Adds only the cells that meet a condition.
=SUMIF(B2:B100, "North", C2:C100) adds all values in column C where the corresponding row in column B says “North.” I use this constantly for regional or category-based totals.
COUNTIF — Counts cells that meet a condition.
=COUNTIF(D2:D100, "Completed") counts how many cells in column D contain the word “Completed.” Indispensable for tracking status in any kind of project or task list.
AVERAGEIF — Averages only the cells that meet a condition. Same syntax as the others, and just as useful.
These three IF-variations replaced a lot of manual filtering and counting I used to do before I learned them. Instead of filtering a column to see how many “Completed” items I had and counting visually, COUNTIF does it in two seconds.
Tip 6: Format as Table — The Button That Changes Everything
Most people build spreadsheets by just typing data into cells and formatting as they go. There’s a better starting structure: Format as Table.
How to use it: Click anywhere in your data, go to the Home tab, and click “Format as Table.” Choose a style. Excel will ask you to confirm the range and whether your data has headers. Click OK.
What you get: automatic filtering dropdowns on every header, nice visual formatting, and — most importantly — a structured table where formulas automatically extend to new rows. Add a row at the bottom, and your SUM formulas update to include it without you touching them.
Tables also make your formulas more readable. Instead of =SUM(C2:C100), a table formula might read =SUM(Table1[Revenue]), which tells you exactly what’s being added.
I don’t format every spreadsheet as a table, but for any data I’ll be filtering, sorting, or using formulas on regularly, it’s almost always the right structure to use.
Tip 7: Conditional Formatting Makes Patterns Visible Instantly
Numbers in a plain column are hard to read quickly. Conditional formatting changes the appearance of cells based on their values — colour-coding them — so patterns jump out visually without you having to analyze anything.
A simple example: Select a column of numbers. Go to Home → Conditional Formatting → Color Scales → choose a red-yellow-green scale. Every cell now gets a color from red (low values) to green (high values) proportionally. At a glance you can see which rows have the highest and lowest values without sorting or thinking.
Another common use: highlighting cells that meet a condition. Select a range, go to Conditional Formatting → Highlight Cell Rules → Greater Than, type in a threshold number, choose a highlight color. Every cell above that threshold turns that color automatically, even as the data changes.
I use conditional formatting to flag overdue dates (dates in the past turn red), to highlight values above budget (numbers over a threshold turn orange), and to visually check for duplicates in a column (duplicate values get highlighted). All of these things would take real effort to spot manually in a large dataset and take about 30 seconds to set up with conditional formatting.
Tip 8: Never Merge Cells. Use Center Across Selection Instead.
This is one of those tips that sounds like a rule for the sake of rules until you discover why it exists.
Merging cells — selecting several cells and clicking “Merge & Center” — looks neat for headers. But merged cells cause serious problems when you try to sort, filter, or use formulas on that data. Excel can’t handle merged cells in data ranges the way it handles normal cells, and you’ll get error messages or unexpected behavior that’s confusing to diagnose.
The alternative that gives the same visual result without the problems: select the cells you want to center a heading across, right-click → Format Cells → Alignment tab → Horizontal → “Center Across Selection.” Your text appears centered across multiple columns exactly like Merge & Center, but the cells remain separate and everything works normally.
I learned this one after spending twenty minutes trying to figure out why my sort function wasn’t working, only to find a merged cell header was the culprit.
Tip 9: VLOOKUP in Plain Language (It’s Not as Scary as It Sounds)
VLOOKUP is the formula that separates “knows Excel basics” from “actually knows Excel,” and it has an intimidating reputation it doesn’t fully deserve.
Here’s what it does in one sentence: it looks up a value in one column and returns a corresponding value from another column in the same row.
The syntax: =VLOOKUP(what_to_look_for, where_to_look, which_column_to_return, 0)
Real example: Column A has employee IDs. Column B has names. Column D has salary. You’re in a different sheet and you have an ID — let’s say it’s in cell A2. You want to find that employee’s salary.
=VLOOKUP(A2, Sheet1!A:D, 4, 0)
This says: look for whatever’s in A2, search the range A through D on Sheet1, return the value from the 4th column (D, which is salary), and the 0 at the end means find an exact match.
The most common mistake: forgetting the 0 at the end, or putting 1 instead. Without the 0, VLOOKUP does an approximate match, which gives you wrong results without telling you they’re wrong. Always end with 0 for exact matches.
The second most common mistake: the value you’re looking up needs to be in the first (leftmost) column of your lookup range. VLOOKUP can only look to the right from there. If your IDs are in column C and you want data from column A, VLOOKUP can’t do it — you’ll need XLOOKUP (available in newer Excel versions) or an INDEX/MATCH combination, which is worth learning once VLOOKUP feels comfortable.
Tip 10: Save Versions Before You Make Big Changes
Excel’s autosave (available in Microsoft 365 when saving to OneDrive) is helpful, but it’s not the same as having a deliberate backup before you do something significant.
Before sorting a large dataset, before deleting a chunk of data, before running any operation that changes a lot of cells at once — save a copy first. Either Ctrl + S to save the current state, or File → Save As to create a distinctly named version: “Client_Data_BACKUP_July2026.xlsx.”
I’ve undone mistakes with Ctrl + Z plenty of times. But I’ve also had the experience of not realizing something went wrong until I’d done thirty more things on top of it, pushing the mistake beyond undo range. Having a named backup file to go back to is a different kind of safety net, and it costs thirty seconds.
Looking back at my first year with Excel, most of the time I wasted came from not knowing these things existed rather than from any technical inability. The tool was sitting there ready to do in five seconds what I was doing in forty minutes — I just didn’t know to ask it.
The best way to build on what’s here: whenever you find yourself doing something repetitive in Excel, stop and wonder whether there’s a formula or feature that handles it. There usually is. A ten-minute search for “how to do X in Excel” has paid back hours in my experience, consistently, more than almost any other learning investment I’ve made with a piece of software.
Any Question? Contact Us