Hi Fellow Excel Addict,

Welcome to this week's edition of "Spreadsheet Tips From An Excel Addict."

I hope you are sticking to your New Year's resolutions, especially the one, "I promise to learn all about Excel this year and become a local spreadsheet expert." ;) Anyway, I'm hoping that was one of yours.

Well, I've got some more great tips this week to add to your Excel knowledge bank. I hope you'll enjoy them.

To Your Success!
Francis Hayes (The Excel Addict)

This is a great keyboard shortcut that lets you select the current range around the active cell. Basically it selects the largest rectangle of data surrounded by white space. Whenever you have to select a large table or list, this is a great time saver.

All you have to do each month is click here to recommend my newsletter and website to a friend. For each person that you refer, your name will go into the t-shirt draw. The more Excel friends you refer, the more chances you have of winning a t-shirt. But please, recommend it only to people you know and who are Microsoft Excel users.

If you use the 'Tell A Friend' link at www.TheExcelAddict.com you could win $10,000 and you will also qualify for my t-shirt draw.

*** Each monthly winner will be notified by email and will have 10 days to reply with a shipping address. If I don't receive a reply within 10 days, another name will be drawn.

T-Shirt Contest Winners
December November October September August July June	Joseph Mathew, Dubai, United Arab Emirates Alexandre Gusmao, Lisbon, Portugal Apollo Tigalo, Angeles City, Philippines Jim Henderson, California, USA Beki Chambers, Indiana, USA Keith Bannister, North Carolina, USA Lisa Hobbs, Pennsylvania, USA

Here's a cool little trick that I'm sure you'll find uses for. You know sometimes when you see a table of contents in a book, it shows a topic on the left, the page number on the right, and a line of repeating dots in between. Using this tip, I'll show you how to format cells in Excel to display a line of dots that extend to the right edge of the cell for whatever text you enter in the cells.

Let's try it...

1. Open a blank worksheet
2. Select Column B.
3. Choose Format, Cells, and select the Number tab
4. Click on the Custom category.
   - The @ symbol is a placeholder for text.
   - The * (asterisk) indicates repetition of the character following it.
   - Therefore, the custom format @*. tells Excel that this cell is text and the dots should be repeated to the right edge of the cell.
   
5. With the Custom category selected, enter @*. (at + asterisk + period) in the Type field.
6. Click OK.
7. Now, type some text and see the results. Widen the column and see what happens.

Also, you are not limited to using this in cells formatted as text. You can extend the dots (or other characters) to the left of numbers by entering *. (asterisk + period) in front of a number format
(i.e. *.$0.00). Play around with it. You'll probably discover other possibilities.

There are tens of millions of other Microsoft Excel users all over the world. The vast majority of them have a very limited knowledge of Excel's capabilities. My goal is to share this information with everyone I possibly can and help them to benefit from Excel's amazing capabilities.

Please help me spread the word about my newsletter. If you know other Excel users, please tell them about "Spreadsheet Tips From An Excel Addict". I'm sure they'll appreciate it.

Maybe you know someone who supervises or employs many Excel users. That's where your referral could have a big impact.

VERY IMPORTANT: Please refer only people you know personally, who use Microsoft Excel and would benefit from this newsletter.

Joel preferred having separate buttons for each open window. I have to agree. It makes it much easier for switching between windows.

If you do too and would like to change Windows XP back here's a simple solution:

1. Right-click on the Taskbar.
2. Choose Properties.
3. Under the Taskbar tab, remove the check mark from the "Group similar taskbar buttons"
4. Click OK.

If you're using Excel 2000 and don't see separate buttons in the taskbar, choose Tools, Options, and on the View tab place a check mark in 'Windows in Taskbar'.

If you're still using Excel 97 or Excel 95 you're probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about. It's only been since Excel 2000 that Windows displays taskbar buttons for each open window. So, this tip doesn't apply to you. You still have to use the Window menu to switch between open Excel workbooks. Or if you remember my tip from a couple of months ago, you can use the much faster CTRL+F6 keyboard shortcut.