I often want to present a date in the why I think suits the reader rather that the options given in Excel.

Luckily, Excel gives the ability to customise all formats. I wanted to show the date in the following format: Sun 4 May 08. By selecting the Custom option from the Format cells dialogue I was able to change the format type to ddd d mmm yy.

By using the letters ddd, my date will show the three letter version of the day, i.e. Mon, Tue etc. If I used dddd, the full day name would be shown. The month works in the same way, m will give 1 digit, mm will give 2 digits, with a leading zero for months earlier than October. mmm will give the three letter version of the month and mmmm will show the full text of the month. Years have only two options y and yy show the 2 digit version of the year, yyy and yyyy give the four digit version of the year.

If you date format is too long for the cell and you don’t want to make the cell wider, then you should convert the date to text by using the TEXT() function. Try this example =TEXT(TODAY(),”dddd d mmmm yy”) where TODAY() will give you today’s date.

Indenting text in cells without adding spaces

There are times you will have a column of text immediately to the right of a column of numbers they both look squashed.

Too many people insert spaces at the beginning of each of their text entries to provide some ‘white space’. There are various reasons why this is not the best option, including the fact that it is very time consuming.

There is a much easier way easier way to achieve the same result by formatting the cells.

• Select the cells that contain the data you want indented;
• From the Format menu select Cells;
• Click on the Alignment tab and select Left (Indent) from the Horizontal dropdown list.
  On the Indent spinner box set the number of spaces you want to insert between the start of your text and the left edge of the the column;
• Click OK and you’re done.

Ctrl+Shift+%

As easy as that! This keyboard short cut will format the selected cells as percentages to 2 deciamal places. It is the same as clicking the % button on the format toolbar, but much quicker