Chinese New Year is coming really soon. Let’s talk about something about “New” in Excel in this post… but don’t make me wrong, I am not talking about any new features in Excel 2016/2019/365. Indeed, what I am going to discuss about is a feature that exists for a long long time, but not many people are using it (at least not to the people I work with).
Interestingly, this “New” stuff is very common and I believe all Excel users have used it at the most fundamental way.
Still have no idea what I am talking about? Watch the following:
Note: All screenshots are prepared using Excel for Office 365
Yes… That’s the “New” stuff I am talking about. 🙂
You may be wondering… Excuse me?? What???…
Try this: Talk to your colleagues and ask them if they have ever selected anything other than “Blank Workbook” on the “New” page, the answer you will get is probably “NO”.
That’s the case for me at least. When I conducted in-house Excel training/workshops and asked about that, none of the participants had ever started something new other than “Blank workbook”. Most of the people simply go straight to have a new blank workbook. No surprise.
Then I asked: Did you know there are many nice templates readily available for usage? To be more specific, there are templates for
- Business
- Personal
- Planners and Trackers
- Lists
- Budgets
- Charts
- Calendars
Everyone laughed… and admitted that they had never noticed that.
Just a simple demo, they were impressed.
Couldn’t find a template that suits your need? Try to search:
You may find a template that may suit your need.
To advanced Excel users, they may not like the templates as they may have built their own templates already, or they can build a template fairly quick. Having said that, these template could be a good starting point to work with if you need something similar.
However, for most regular Excel users, these templates are really nice and handy. They just somehow “miss” all these templates. More than that, if you are learning Excel by yourself, you may reverse-engineering these templates and you will learn a lot.
Check it out! The templates are there waiting for your to discover, like many other features.
Stay curious! Keep learning!
wmfexcel 