A Few Helpful Calc Display and Usage Tips (in a fresh all-new post!)

I'm back! And not with a vengeance, just with a couple Calc display tips that you might find useful.

It's all about investigating what's in there when you choose Tools > Options and start rooting around.

Under Tools > Options > Calc, there's the General category.

There's the Press Enter to Move Selection option, with the corresponding dropdown list. Normally when you press Enter, you move down a cell. However, if you want to move in a different direction, just select it.

Just below that option, there's another option, Press Enter to Switch to Edit Mode.  This is good for non-mouse-types. Normally if you want to type in, rather than select, a cell, you need to double-click in the cell. (Or click in the entry field in the toolbar, of course.) With this option, you just press Enter and you're in edit mode with the cursor, as shown here.

Once you select your options, click OK to save changes and close the window.

Under Tools > Options > Calc, there's also the Edit option.

In the upper right corner, you have the option to show Formulas, rather than the result of the formulas. Mark that option and your spreadsheets will look more like this.

Another option is Value Highlighting. In this case the text is shown in black, numbers in blue and formulas (the results, not the formula) in green.

A third option farther down is Text Overflow. This is on by default, and I like it, but I want to point it out. It's what makes the red triangle show up when you've got too much unwrapped text in a cell, with text in the cell to its right. (If there's nothing in the cell to the right, then the text just flows all the way through. Another approach is to choose Format > Cells, click the Alignment tab, and choose to wrap the text.)

Once you select your options, click OK to save changes and close the window.

Go ahead and explore the other options in these windows, as well; some are pretty obvious and on by default. But some aren't -- and you might find just the option you want to make things a bit easier every day.

 

Comments

[Sessy]

About "Press Enter to Switch to Edit Mode": You can use F2 anytime to enter edit mode (like in Excel).

[Solveig Haugland]

Aha! Excellent tip, thank you Sessy.

"About "Press Enter to Switch to Edit Mode": You can use F2 anytime to enter edit mode (like in Excel)."

[DenisMx]

It would be nice if one could use a shortcut to show formulas instead of computed values in cells. Having to change the options in the menu to do this is cumbersome. Any way to do this with a keyboard shortcut?

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi DenisMx,

I have looked through the options under Tools > Customize and it's all about just finding the right option called Show Formulas in there somewhere. Unfortunately I don't think the Tools > Options are there. I tried recording macros and attaching them to keys but the keys didn't work (I'm not a macro expert). Possibly that much navigation doesn't work in macros.

Solveig

[Mike]

CTRL+` (that's the tilde key) toggles showing formulas

[Heidi]

Is there any way to have the openoffice spreadsheet selection box move down, and left to the first column when I hit enter, like excel seems to do.