How are things going in your corner of the Excel world? I hope you're putting my Excel tips to good use and boosting your productivity through the roof. Maybe you got a big promotion and a big raise. OK, OK, so I'm getting a little carried away but it's nice to dream. Well, I do hope you see a boost in productivity.

I appreciate having you as a subscriber to my newsletter.

Have a great weekend.

To your success,
Francis J Hayes (The Excel Addict)

P.S. VERY IMPORTANT Please remember to include "TheExcelAddict" in the Subject line of any email you send me. This will help it stand out in the flood of junk email I have been receiving lately.

Will you help me reach my goal? As you know, I really love using Excel and sharing my tips with everyone who can benefit from them. My goal is to have my weekly tips going out to 4,000 readers by the end of this year. And I would really appreciate it if you could help me reach my goal by sharing this newsletter with all of your 'Excel-loving' friends and colleagues. You will be helping me and also everyone you share my tips with. Go ahead, email this newsletter right now to three people you know who use Excel. Thanks in advance for your support.

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Do you sometimes need to know the number of characters in a string of text? Counting character by character on your monitor can be a little tricky.

Here's a quick way to count the number of characters in a cell.

Obviously, you replace A1 in this formula with your cell address.

Last week I told you about the Windows Calculator in my "Non- Excel Tip". If you find the calculator useful, here's how you can add a Calculator button to your toolbar in Excel that will launch the Calculator with one click.

1. From the View menu select Toolbars
2. Click Customize.
3. Click the Commands tab.
4. In the Categories list select Tools
5. On the right hand side, under Commands, scroll down till you see the Calculator tool (not the calculate Now tool) immediately below the Camera tool.
6. With your left mouse button, drag the calculator button from the Commands list and drop it somewhere on one of your existing toolbars.
7. Click the Close button.

Erik Koski from California highly recommends the fre e PowerToys Calculator for those of you who need advanced functionality. You can find it here. Thanks Erik

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 know they'll appreciate it. Go ahead, email this newsletter right now to three people you know who use Excel.

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.

Last week I told you about the Windows Calculator. Many of you already knew about it but many more didn't. One of the complaints I hear is that many people don't use it because they find it awkward clicking on the keys with the mouse. What many people don't realize is that you can also use your keyboard to control the calculator.

Using they keypad on your keyboard, you'll find that it feels much more like a real calculator. But to really take advantage of this there are a few keyboard equivalents that you'll need to learn. Learning keyboard equivalents for the most commonly used calculator operations will allow you to easily operate it for doing basic calculations.

• The 0-9+-*/() keys are self-explanitory
• Use the Enter key in place of = (equals)
• Press the DELETE key instead of CE (clear current entry)
• Pressing the ESC key is equivalent to C (clear all)

You can find all the other keyboard equivalents under the Calculator Help.

If you'd like to have the numbers displayed with commas (i.e. thousands) you can select Digit Grouping from the View menu. Another useful tip is that you can highlight and copy (CTRL+C) the results of your calculation and paste (CTRL+V) them in other documents.