“General” Category

When we open the “Excel Options” dialog, the left side displays the different options categories while the right side shows the various options for a selected category.

The first category is the “General” category with the following options:

User Interface Options:

• “Show Mini Toolbar on selection”: When this option is checked, it shows the mini toolbar (1) – again – when we select the text or numbers in a cell.
  If we still wish to see the Mini toolbar when it is disabled, we can right click in the selected cell.
• “Enable Live Preview”: This option shows an example of what the “Worksheet” will look like when we choose an assignment. Very interesting option as it enables a “live” preview of how a feature affect the document as you hover over the different choices.
• “Color Scheme”: Seems clear and straightforward.
• “Screentip Style”: ScreenTips are small windows that display descriptive text when you rest the pointer on a command or control. This option enables you to show or hide to ScreenTips or ScreenTips feature descriptions.

When creating new workbooks:

• “Use this font”: seems clear
• “Font Size”: seems clear
• “Default view for new sheets”: all these options are obvious
• “Include this many sheets”: With this option, we can set the desired number of “Worksheets” in our new “Workbook”. The default setting is three worksheets but we usually work with only one “Worksheet”. If we need more or less, we can change it here. Adding a “Worksheet” takes only a fraction of a second.

Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office:

The last option, “Username” is pretty obvious.

“Formulas” Category

The second category is the “Formulas” category. Not many changes are required. Perhaps the most important option here is the “Automatic” calculation of a “Workbook” (1). When you work with extremely large and complex “Spreadsheets”, you would set this option to “Manual”. This way, “Excel” will not keep calculating every time when you change the contents of a cell. But only when the automatic calculations within “Excel” slow the operation, should you set this option to “Manual”. When set to “Manual”, you have the F9 key on your keyboard to perform the calculations in the “Excel Spreadsheet”.

“Proofing” Category

The third category is the “Proofing” category. All these options are no different than the options in the “MS Word” application and seem obvious. Perhaps the only thing which deserves some explanation is the “AutoCorrect Options” (1) tab. When we click it, it opens a dialog box (2) where we type data that can be replaced by other data (3). This can be useful, for example when the name of your company appears several times and needs to be replaced. This is just the same as in “Microsoft Word”.

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