How to Use Excel Options using Microsoft Excel 2013
Excel Options are an important aspect of Microsoft Excel by allowing you to set up your preferred options. If you need to make Excel 2013 suitable for your work, you can do that by setting this up. So first off, let’s look at how we access the Excel Options.
Excel Options is on the left side of the Backstage View, at the bottom. Click on it, and a dialog box will open. There you can get the link bringing you to Help. And the dialog box displays the set of Pages, such as General Page, Formulas Page, Proofing, Save, and Languages.
Let’s start from the General Page.
You can write your own user name in the section Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office to annotate the workbooks you create. Another main option permits you to select the Office Theme and Office Background you want to use. Also, you can manage the displayed screen tips in first section on the General tab by dropping down the Screen Tip Style. You will get the options:
• Show feature descriptions in screen tips is the full version of screen tips
• Don’t show feature descriptions will give only the tip or title, if you like
Any changes you make in Excel Options only actually get executed when you click OK. After you’ve been using Excel for a while, you can switch them off.
The second section of the General page is When creating new workbooks. Here you’ll see the default body font for current and new Excel workbooks. For example, if the font size is set to 11, that means new workbooks will have 11 as the font size. The font can be changed to different themes for heading fonts or specific fonts by dropping down. The long list of fonts available will pop-up and you can select any of them.
Another important option here is the default view, Normal View. Here we also have Include this many sheets. Unlike in Excel 2010 or earlier versions of the software, the default creates one sheet in a new workbook in Excel 2013.
Show the Start Screen when this application starts is another useful setting on the General Page. It’s found right at the bottom. The Start Screen displays the template images with the Recent list on the left. If you want to go into Excel without the Start Screen, uncheck this box and click OK.
Now open Save Page. Here you can save Excel files on the SkyDrive or on your computer. You can select the default local file location to save workbooks on your computer. For that, there’s a checkbox named Save to computer by default.
The next page is Language. You can set-up the default language here, and if you use another language, you can add additional languages here, too. If you look at the drop-down, below this main box, you’ll see the list of languages to select from. To remove a language, use the Remove button on the right.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
