My sister-in-law is a certified Excel genius. Back in the early 90's, when I was just getting interested in IT, she was writing programs in Excel running on DOS(6, I think?) that were being used to simulate nuclear meltdowns at actual nuclear power plants here in the states. They would enter in the baseline parameters, programmatically create a failure in some internal system, then run the simulation and 'see what happened'. They actually somehow linked it with the internal systems at the facility, right down to the sensors, alarms, monitors, etc. Really wild stuff. Whenever she would change some of the formulas she would wait until the weekend and then have their brand-spanken-new 486 DX2/66 with 8 mb of ram (8 mb of ram cost north of $2000 back then) chew on the spreadsheet for 3 days to finish the re-calculations. I've probably just violated a whole bunch of national security guidelines by writing this, so if this site's gone next weekend and you never hear from me again [hey, did I just see a black helicopter?!!?]...

Anyhooo, I remember her saying to me "You want to be a programmer? Start by figuring out a lookup function in Excel. If you can get your head around that then you 'may' just be smart enough ..."

Funny how things change. What was once the lofty domain of the geek elite is now common ground for every weekend warrior with a beat up computer on their desk. These days I see formulas in Excel from computers on our plant floor, written by grandmothers, that would have knocked me off a chair 10 years ago. Lookup functions fall firmly into this category - it just ain't rocket science anymore.

So you have a document that you need to send to more than a couple of people. Maybe hundreds, or even thousand of people. Or you want to print the labels for your holiday greeting cards, so that you don't have to put pen to paper to get all of the addresses on the envelopes. Getting married? When we did, we put the names and addresses of all of the invited guests into an Excel spreadsheet, along with phone numbers, the RSVP, dinner dish selection, and after the wedding the gift received. Invitations and thank you cards went out using the same mail merge, from Excel to the label sheets using Word for the layout. It may sound complicated, but it really is a great time saver once you've figured out how to set it up. It takes a few steps to walk through the wizard, and the first time you do it you'll need to pay attention, but it really is easy!

A week ago or so E happens to mention a project that she has taken on at work. It was fairly complex, and for one part of it she needed to be able to dynamically update a row with the date for the end of the month, for the next 12 months. She wanted to be able to enter in a starting date, then have the adjacent 12 cells fill in automatically with the last day of the month for the next 12 months. I knew this could be done with a fairly complex formula, and certainly with some VBA code. But it seemed to me I had run across an end of month function previously in Excel, and with just a little bit of investigation I found it. Strangely enough, it's called EOMONTH, and here's how you can find it and use it.

Once you start getting into some of the more advanced functions in Excel you're going to want to start defining and naming ranges. Doing so makes your functions much easier to write, and much easier for someone else to understand. All that you're doing when you define or name a range in Excel is to select a cell, or a series of cells, and assign a meaningful name to those cells.

Do you have a spreadsheet that spans multiple pages, with a descriptive header at the top of the sheet? If you do, you probably want to have the header print at the top of each page. The easiest and fastest way to do this is by setting the Print Titles in the page setup options.

This one comes up all the time. You have data in a cell in Excel, and you want to get it to wrap to another line within that same cell. You're tempted to hit [Enter], just the same as you would if you were using Word or some other text editor. The only problem is that doing that will just take you to the next cell. Instead, you can place a hard return within a cell by holding down [Alt] key, and then pressing the [Enter] key. This will force a new line within that cell.

You've got a spreadsheet with a ton of data in it, organized by years. You want to be able to selectively filter by various years to be able to get a better picture of the data. How do you do it, without creating a slew of ranges or lookups? Simple, Autofilter to the rescue.

How many times have you needed to select a whole page of cells in Microsoft Excel, selected all of the data in the first row, then dragged, and dragged, and dragged to get to the last row of the data. Then, just as you get close to the last row with data it goes 'whoosh', and you find yourself 20,000 rows down. So you try to go back up the page, then go past the end of the data, then back down, then back up.... Well, you get the picture. There's a fast easy way, using a couple of shortcut keys.

You open Excel to see the standard three worksheets looking back at you. I've discovered over the years that there are quite a few people that work with Excel on a regular basis that don't know that you have quite a bit of flexibility with the worksheets. You can change the default number of sheets that a new workbook will start with, you can have almost as many as you want, you can rename, drag and drop, copy and duplicate, and even change the colors (kind of).

The problem:

• You have a very large spreadsheet with descriptive headers in the first row and in the first column. As you scroll down or across the spreadsheet you loose sight of those headers, so you can no longer tell what you're looking at.

The solution:

• Use the split panes and freeze panes feature in Excel to lock the header rows and columns so they stay in view.