Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft Excel

Excel Settings

1. When I enter a value, it appears with two decimal places. For example, when I enter 154 it shows up as 1.54. What's wrong?

Somehow Excel's fixed-decimal mode was turned on. To return to normal, select Tools, Options to display the Options dialog box. Then click the Edit tab and remove the check mark from the "Fixed decimal" option. Of course, this feature can be useful when entering some types of data, but most of the time, you'll want to keep the fixed-decimal mode turned off.

2. Can I change the color of the worksheet tabs in my workbook?

In a word, no. It would certainly be helpful to be able to color-code your worksheet tabs. For some reason, Microsoft hasn't implemented this feature, which has been available in 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro for quite a while.

3. I saved my workbook with a password, but Excel doesn't recognize it and won't let me open the file. Am I out of luck?

First, remember that passwords are case sensitive. So if you originally entered your password as Xyzzy, typing xyzzy won't work. If you know you're entering the password correctly, then it's time to start looking for a password recovery utility. Several utilities exist, and none of them are free. Do an Internet search for "Excel password recovery," and you'll find several products that will come to the rescue. By the way, the fact that these products exist might raise some alarms for the security-minded. Bottom line? Excel password protection isn't as secure as you might expect.

4. How can I increase the number of rows or columns in a worksheet?

In Excel, every workbook has 255 columns and 65,526 rows. These values are fixed and cannot be changed. If you need more rows, you might want to consider using a database (such as Access) or another spreadsheet (Quattro Pro can handle a million rows) for data storage. In most cases, you probably don't need to work with all of your data at once. You'll usually need only a subset of your data. You can use Excel's Data, Get External Data command to query the database and bring in only the records you need.