Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Using Go to Special in Excel”.
In this article, i’m going to show you how to use the go to special feature in microsoft, excel it’s a great useful tool to help us improve our use of excel. So here i am in a spreadsheet, that’s an employee list and let’s say i need some help: finding certain information or certain features of this spreadsheet, rather than just scrutinize each cell. I could use go to special you’ll find go to special here on the home tab on the home ribbon in the editing group. Here it is find and select.
You click there and then you’ll find go to special when you click that you get a pop-up where you can indicate the special things that you want to be able to find in excel. So let’s say i just want to find all of the notes that have been put into this spreadsheet now this is a fairly small spreadsheet, but imagine a spreadsheet with dozens and dozens of columns, thousands and thousands of rows. It could be very hard to identify where the notes are in the spreadsheet, but with go to special. I just make sure notes is selected. Click, ok and look what it did. It’S highlighted a couple of spots in my spreadsheet, where there are notes you can see. The notes are indicated with this red triangle in the upper right corner of the cell.
When i put my mouse on that, the note appears. So that’s a good start, but go to special can help us find much more than just notes. So, let’s activate it again this time, instead of going to the home tab and clicking on, find and select and then go to special, i’m going to use the keyboard shortcut. Ctrl g will bring up this go to pop-up box and then i could click special to get to the same location, but there’s an even faster keyboard shortcut. If you do ctrl g and then alt s that will open up, go to special, so try to memorize that ctrl g alt s and that will quickly take you to go to special.
Let’S look at a few other special aspects of a spreadsheet that you could search for what about formulas? Sometimes it’s hard to tell where all the formulas are in excel and there’s a couple of ways that you can display formulas. But this is a good one. You could display all formulas just by making sure this is selected, clicking, ok and it’s highlighted all of the cells that have formulas in them. I’M going to click away and i’ll. Try the keyboard shortcut again: ctrl g alt s – let’s now identify all of the blanks in this spreadsheet. This could be a very important thing to do in your spreadsheets.
In most cases, you don’t want blanks within a range in excel, so i click. Ok, these blanks are probably understandable, but look excel, also identified a couple of blanks that really shouldn’t be there. Let’S go to special again ctrl g alt s.
What about objects? What if i want my attention drawn to all of the objects that are in this spreadsheet? I select objects, click, ok, and it takes me to the one object. That’S in the spreadsheet, it’s a form, control checkbox. If you want to learn how to add these into your spreadsheets and how to use them.
Please watch my other videos on that topic, but go to special can help. You find all of the objects like that one in your spreadsheets. Let’S click away from that and then try ctrl g alt s again, you could use go to special to help.
You find the last cell in your data. I’Ll click. Ok, in this case, it’s not that dramatic. It just takes me back to h23. Yes, i have other cells, but they’re, not really part of my range of data, so it just takes me to the lower right corner, the last cell in my range of data.
Now, if you keep returning to the go to special pop-up, it’s important that you click away from whatever it took you to before, trying it again so ctrl g alt s now all of the options are activated. So if you tried activating go to special earlier in the video and it didn’t work, that’s probably why you need to click away from where it took you before you try to activate it again. Let’S look at one more example. What if i want to search my spreadsheet to find conditional formats again, it could be sometimes hard to tell where a conditional format has been applied or not applied with that selected.
I click ok and it’s telling me that there’s a conditional format applied here in column f, i happen to know what it is. It basically formats the cell differently if the number in the cell is higher than 150 000., but because none of the numbers are that high. It’S not at all obvious that there’s a conditional format set up here in column, f and yet thanks to go to special.
I can find where all my conditional formats are, if you’d like to learn how to do conditional formatting in your own spreadsheets. Please watch my tutorials on that topic, so i hope you can see how useful and powerful and kind of fun this go to special option. Can be in microsoft, excel thanks for watching.
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