How to Use Microsoft Excel 2016 Options
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, you will learn how to personalize your use of this program through Excel Options. We will show you how to setup your own username, how to customize the office background and theme, how to modify the user interface options, how to set a default file location and how to add and change editing languages.
Video Transcript
In this section we’re going to look at the very important subject of Excel Options. And Excel Options are used basically to customize and personalize your installation of Excel and your use of Excel. Now in the very early stages of learning Excel many of these options won’t really mean very much to you so we will come back to them from time to time later on and I’ll explain the options you need as we go through the balance of the course. But before we really get started with Excel you need to make sure that a few basic options are setup in the way that you need them to be.
Now although Excel Options will appear at various points during your use Excel 2016 the conventional way to access them is from Backstage View. So the first thing I’m going to do is to go into Backstage View and one of the pages is Options. It’s the second one from the bottom here. And that brings up the Excel Options dialogue.
Now this dialogue is made up of a number of pages and the first page is General, I’ll come back to that in a moment, then we have Formulas, Proofing and so on. And most of these pages we won’t really be looking at at all until later stages of the course. But we are going to start with two or three of them and in particular we’re going to start with the General page.
Now I’m going to cover the items on the General page in a sort of haphazard order but there is a reason for doing them in the sequence that I’m going to go through them.
So I want to start with this section, Personalize Your Copy of Microsoft Office, and this selection will actually affect the whole of Microsoft Office, not just Excel. First of all your username. Now your username will be particularly important if, for example, you are working with others on documents and you’re adding comments, you’re annotating, workbooks, etcetera and you want to keep a track of who has made whatever comment or even who has made changes to a workbook then these can be identified using the username that you’ve set up here. By default it gets the username associated with the account that you’re running Excel under but you can change that name. Some people use a nickname rather than their real name here.
Note the checkbox under there to say always use these values regardless of sign in to Office. So if you want to use those values whichever account you’re signing into Office with then you just check that box.
Now there are then two settings which also relate to Office in general. That’s the Office Background and the Office Theme. Now I currently have the Background set to No Background and the Office Theme set to Colorful. My settings are primarily set that way in order to make it as easy as possible for you to see what’s on the screen but you may choose to go for something a little bit more dynamic than this.
One very important point here, let’s suppose that I change the Background to say Underwater. You won’t see any particular change happening. And in fact whatever changes you make when you are adjusting the Excel Options are only activated when you click Okay. So I’m currently set on Underwater Colorful. Just take a look at the top right hand area of the screen when I click on Okay. You might just about see there some fishes and various other underwater creatures appearing there. It’s a bit difficult to see with the Colorful setting. It’s a little bit easier if I change from Colorful to White as my Office Theme. Don’t forget the Office Themes were extended in Excel 2016. Let’s click on Okay and you can see the Underwater background there. Now the Background and the Themes have varying levels of, if you like, in your face-ness and generally speaking they’re quite subdued. But you may want to choose something that suits your particular style.
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Now I want to go up to the top of the General page and look at User Interface Options. I mentioned earlier on in the course Screen Tips as a sort of help in Excel 2016. And if I hover over one of the entries on this page, that one for example, a Screen Tip comes up. Show Mini Toolbar on selection. And there is also under that what’s called a Screen Tip Description. So if you like some fuller information about the Screen Tip.
Now although in the early stages of using Excel you’ll probably find these very useful they can be quite annoying because they can get in the way of things. And when you’ve been using Excel for a while you’ll probably get to the point that you don’t really need them. You can switch them off. In fact when I’m recording this in many ways it would be better if I switched them off because quite often they get in the way of what I’m trying to show you but I am keeping them switched on because I think the tips themselves are very useful in the early stages of learning Excel.
Now the way that you control them is using this Screen Tip Style setting here. Show feature descriptions in Screen Tips. Supposing I change that now and say Don’t show feature descriptions in Screen Tips what do you think would happen if I hovered over that top option again? Well of course you still see the whole thing. Don’t forget you have to click on Okay. Now if I hover over a command on the Ribbon all you see is the name of the command. It just says Merge and Center. Let me go back into options again. Let’s say change that back to Show feature descriptions, click on Okay. I’m going to hover over Merge and Center again. Now I get Merge and Center and the description. And once again that’s an option that you may want to set very early on in your use of Excel and may want to change later on when perhaps the Screen Tips become unnecessary for you.
And one other thing. If you look down at the bottom of the General page, the very bottom option there, Show the Start Screen when this application starts. We’ve seen the Start Screen several times already on the course. If you don’t particularly need to see the Start Screen, if you’d like to open straight into Excel disable that option and you won’t see the Start Screen anymore. And you might want to just try that just to get used to using Excel Options and then if you do want the Start Screen you can switch it back on again.
Now one other option that I’d like to mention early on or in fact one other group is this section When Creating New Workbooks. Now it may well be that you want to start all of your workbooks with a particular font, perhaps a particular font size, perhaps you need the text to be a little bit bigger or you’d like it to be a little bit smaller. You can adjust that here. The other thing you’ll notice here and this may be of interest particularly to those of you who’ve used a much earlier version of Excel, the bottom option there, Include this many sheets, says one. That controls how many empty sheets you get when you create a new workbook and by default it’s set as one, as I mentioned earlier. In much earlier versions Excel it was always three. But if you’d like to get three or some other number every time you create a workbook you can change that there.
Let’s now turn our attention to the Save page. There are a couple of very important things on the Save page. One of them near the top there is Save AutoRecover information and by default that is checked. That means that at the interval you select there by default it’s ten minutes. What Excel does is to save a copy of your work so that if something goes horribly wrong, for example if you’re working on a PC or some other device that doesn’t have a battery or indeed if your battery just goes flat in the middle of doing some work you don’t lose what you’ve been doing. At least you only lose it back to the last auto save. I strongly recommend that you have AutoRecover set because it does mean that you won’t lose hours of work in the event of, for example as I said, a power cut or something like that or even a software or hardware failure of some other sort.
The other useful setting here is this one, Default local file location. If when you want to save to your computer, not to the Cloud but to your computer you want to by default save in a particular location you can set that location here. As you can see Excel has used a default local file location as its default. So change that if you’d like to.
The third page that I’d like to look at now is the Language page. You need to make sure that you have the language that you use or languages that you use setup. I use English (United States) and English (United Kingdom) more or less 50/50 but English (United States) is set as my default. You can add additional languages if you’d like to. There’s a very, very long list of languages here.
And the other thing to bear in mind is that some people, including me in some case, work in a situation where they may be working on a workbook which is in one language but their language is a different language. So for instance, I might edit a workbook which has information in Spanish and I may want to, for example, Spell Check in Spanish. But I’d like all of the display, the Help information and so on, in English because I am an English speaker. So you have the Editing Languages at the top. If you like the languages that you’re using within the workbooks but then here Choose Display and Help Languages. If you’d actually, for example, like to work on an English workbook but your mother tongue is French then you may want to set the Editing Language English and the Display and Help Language at French. But do make sure that you have your language or languages set correctly.
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So they’re the things I’d like you to make sure that you have set correctly before we go any farther. Of course you’ll potentially change some later on. Make sure they’re okay. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
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!
