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There are very, very few people on planet Earth who could ever say they've completely mastered every intricate little thing about Microsoft Excel. It's the world's premiere spreadsheet application, and has been the industry standard for over 20 years, replacing the once-venerable Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for PCs in the 1980s. Microsoft Excel's dominance as a spreadsheet has yet to be truly tested, certainly not by Corel's Quattro Pro (yes, still sold today!), especially not by the open source tools from Apache or LibreOffice, nor even by Google's Sheets (the spreadsheet part of Google Drive).

There's a reason for that. Excel is more than a brand everyone knows: it is powerful. It does just about everything one could ask for in a spreadsheet. The current Excel 2013 version, available as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription and other methods, is PCMag's Editors' Choice spreadsheet. We found that it is "still far and away the most powerful, and now the easiest-to-use, worksheet app...it's the first and only choice for manipulating numeric data."

It's not just for numbers. Plenty of people populate Excel's seemingly infinite grids with data, using it as a flat-file database. It can make a relatively effective contact manager or full-blown customer relationship manager. And of course, it's not all that shocking to see people using it as their word processor, despite Microsoft Word typically sitting right next to it on the hard drive.

One thing almost every Excel user has in common: not knowing enough. There are so many ways to slice and dice numbers, give that data a new look, and more, it's impossible to recount them all. Entire books are written on the topic. But it's easy to master some of the more interesting and intricate tips that will make your time using the program a little easier, and will make you look like your office's guru of high-tech spreadsheetery. So bone up on any or all of these tricks to excel at Excel.

Click to view PC Magazine's Slideshow