Page 152 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

134 Adjusting Columns and Rows
When naming a cell range, however, you must observe the following naming conventions:
✦ Begin the range name with a letter of the alphabet rather than a number or punctuation mark.
✦ Don’t use spaces in the range name; instead, use an underscore between words in a range name (as in Qtr_1).
✦ Make sure that the range name doesn’t duplicate any cell reference in the worksheet by using either the standard A1 or R1C1 notation system.
✦ Make sure that the range name is unique in the worksheet.
After you’ve assigned a name to a cell range, you can select all its cells simply by clicking the name on the pop-up menu attached to the Name
box on the Formula bar. The beauty of this method is that you can use it from anywhere in the same sheet or a different worksheet in the workbook because as soon as you click its name on the Name box pop-up menu, Excel takes you directly to the range, while at the same time automatically select- ing all its cells.
Range names are also very useful when building formulas in your spread- sheet. For more on creating and using range names, see Book III, Chapter 1.
If you’re using a touchscreen device without access to a mouse or physical keyboard, I can’t recommend highly enough naming cell ranges that you regularly select for editing or printing in Excel 2013. Tapping the range name on the Name box’s drop-down menu to select a large and distant cell range in a worksheet on the normally very small and cramped screen of a Windows tablet is so far superior to futzing with the cell’s selection handles to select the range that it’s just not funny!
Adjusting Columns and Rows
Along with knowing how to select cells for formatting, you really also have to know how to adjust the width of your columns and the heights of your rows. Why? Because often in the course of assigning different formatting to certain cell ranges (such as new font and font size in boldface type), you may find that data entries that previously fit within the original widths of their column no longer do and that the rows that they occupy seem to have changed height all on their own.
In a blank worksheet, all the columns and rows are the same standard width and height. The actual number of characters or pixels depends upon the aspect ratio of the device upon which you’re running Excel 2013. On most computer monitors, all Excel 2013 worksheet columns start out 8.43