Taking Advantage of AutoComplete

Another useful feature that Excel provides to help take some of the drudgery out of entering information into a workbook is the AutoComplete feature. Excel keeps a list of all the labels that you enter on a worksheet by column. For example, suppose you have a worksheet tracking sales in Europe and you are entering country names , such as Germany, Italy, and so on, multiple times into a particular column in the worksheet. After you enter Germany the first time, it becomes part of the AutoComplete list for that column. The next time you enter the letter G into a cell in that column, Excel completes the entry as "Germany."

You can also select an entry from the AutoComplete list. This allows you to see the entire list of available entries. Follow these steps:

1. Enter your text and value data as needed onto the worksheet.

2. If you want to select a text entry from the AutoComplete list, to fill an empty cell, right-click that cell. A shortcut menu appears.

3. Select Pick from List from the shortcut menu. A list of text entries (in alphabetical order) appears below the current cell.

4. Click a word in the list to insert it into the current, empty cell.

Adding Data to Excel Using Voice Recognition The Office Speech Recognition feature can also be used to enter data into an Excel worksheet and to perform voice commands. If you have a computer that is set up with a sound card and microphone, you can use this feature. See Lesson 4, "Using the Office Speech Feature," in Part 1 of this book to learn how to get the voice feature up and running and to use it to enter information into Office applications such as Excel.