Here’s a cool time-saving trick that I stumbled across the other day – I was moving around some rows in a worksheet, following the usual routine of adding the space needed then completing the copy / cut and paste into the new space.

Unfortunately, this means a lot of steps… add the needed blank rows / columns / cells, copy or cut the data, paste the data and then, if it was a cut situation, go back and remove the empty space that I had created.

Not a difficult task, and yet a bit of a pain.

At any rate, I was working on moving things around when I accidentally got ahead of myself and copied the rows before I inserted a new location into which I could place them.

Much to my surprise when I clicked the Insert button on the Home tab of the Ribbon…

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…I found that my rows were pasted at the same time the space was inserted!

Of course I began to explore what I could do with this and found that it worked with cut material – the cut data was moved to it’s new location and the empty cells that the move created were removed at the same time.

As I continued to check things out I discovered that the process worked with rows, columns and cells… so pretty much anything you’d need to work with.

When I attempted this with cells that had officially been converted to table form I found that Excel didn’t always like what I was trying to do – but with plain old cells in a worksheet things went better than I ever could have hoped for.

All I can say for that little accidental find is WOW! Talk about making your work more efficient, I don’t think it could get any better than that.

~ April