There are lots of shortcuts in Excel, but In my 13 years of using Excel every day, these are the ones that I think are most useful and a good Excel user should know all of these:

Video Training on Useful Excel Shortcuts:

VLOOKUP is all very well when the data is arranged in the right way for the function - with the thing you're looking for to the left of the thing you want to return, but what happens if you want to do the reverse of VLOOKUP ?

Well, fortunately help is at hand with INDEX + MATCH.

MATCH returns the position of a value in a range
INDEX returns the value of a cell that is offset from another.

Combined, you can use INDEX + MATCH to simulate VLOOKUP, and to do the reverse lookup as well as the VLOOKUP:

Index Match Spreadsheet

Training Video on VLOOKUP INDEX MATCH

There isn't a single function to return the sheet name, but you can use a combination of functions to get at it.

=RIGHT(CELL("filename"),LEN(CELL("filename"))-FIND("]",CELL("filename"),1))

- Here's a breakdown of what it's doing:
Sheet Name example

Training Video on getting Worksheet Name:

I come from a financial background, and the most important date in finance is Today's date. It can mean many things, but the most significant is that it is the date at which the discount factor = 1, but I'll save that discussion for another day.

If you're writing a bond or derivative pricing function, you will need to enter today's date. The Excel function for that is: =TODAY()

- However, this function comes with a toxic hazard warning as it's the most common cause of sluggish spreadsheets in investment banks.

- The problem is that it's a volatile function, and will calculate whenever any cell changes on the sheet, AND for common usage like inserting a row or column.

- SO, the advice is: If you have a spreadsheet, that does a lot of calculations, it requires today's date, and calculation speed is a problem for you... DO NOT USE =TODAY()

Training Video on sluggish spreadsheets caused by the TODAY function:

Today's tip is a quick one as I am feeling lazy, but it's a useful one none the less.

- By formatting dates in a certain way, you can display the day of the week, and not using much space.

Step1:
Select A1, and press CTRL + ;
(this gives you today's date)

Step2:
Right click => format cells => custom
type: ddd dd-mmm-yy

For today, you get:
Sat 27-Dec-08

- this is my favourite date format for the following reasons:
1. the "08" is all you need in this century
2. Sat = day of week
3. 27-Dec => it's completely unambiguous and much better than infuriating American date format of: 12/27/2008 (mm/dd/yyyy), as you will find out when it's the 2nd Jan (01/02/2009)... or is it the 1st of Feb ?!
[End of rant]

; - P

Video training on Date formatting:

There are 2 ways to hide a sheet.

Most people know the first way:
Format => Sheet => hide

Not many know the second way:

Press ALT + F11 to bring up the VBA editor.

.. and change the visible option as shown:

To the untrained eye, this Very Hidden sheet is difficult to find.

If you don't see the "properties" box, single click on "Sheet2" and press F4

Training Video on how to hide sheets:

Screen real estate is a valuable commodity, and with this tip, you can save using it unnecessarily.

If you autofit the columns with large headings, it will look like this:

However, to get it to this is only a few steps:

Step1:
Select the row, right click, format cells, alignment... and click "Wrap Text"

Step2:
Still with the row selected, right click, row height, and change it to something huge like 200

Step3:
For each column reduce the column size manually until you can see each word on one line.

Step4:
Then select the column and type in sequence: ALT then O then C then A

Step5:
Select the row again, and type in sequence: ALT then O then R then A

..if you don't like the look of having one word on each line, the same process works for having 2 words per line.

Training Video on Wrapping Text for large headings: