Although all menu items are tools, in a sense, most are grouped together because they have some commonality (such as the Insert and Format menus). The Tools menu, on the other hand, is more general in nature. It includes a mix of text tools, sharing tools, and other miscellaneous functions that are powerful but don’t necessarily have a common thread.
Opens the AutoCorrect window, where you can edit what Excel tries to correct while you type, such as changing “abbout” to “about.” You can add your own items for Excel to AutoCorrect here.
Opens the Share Workbook window, where you can change an ordinary workbook into one that can be shared by many Excel fans at once on a network. In this window, you can turn workbook sharing on and off, and you can adjust how changes to the shared workbook are treated.
The Track Changes controls how Excel keeps tabs of changes to worksheets and workbooks made by your collaborators. This menu has two submenu options:
Highlight Changes. Opens the Highlight Changes window, where you can turn change tracking on and control which changes are highlighted.
Accept or Reject Changes. Walks you through the changes that have been made to a workbook, giving you a chance to accept or reject each.
Merges all of the changes from a series of shared workbooks into one single workbook.
The Protection menu has three submenu choices that let you choose a level of protection for the currently open worksheet or workbook.
Protect Sheet. Protects the frontmost sheet from changes to cells, charts, graphics, or Visual Basic code.
Protect Workbook. Protects a workbook’s structure from changes such as deleting, adding, hiding, or showing sheets; also keeps windows from being resized.
Protect and Share Workbook. Protects the workbook’s change tracking and sharing status. If the workbook isn’t yet shared, Excel will ask you if you want to do so when this item is selected. If it’s already shared, this command changes to Unprotect Shared Workbook.
Opens the “Flag for Follow Up” window, where you can set a reminder attached to the currently open workbook. That reminder will pop up at the time you specify to remind you to do something with the workbook in question.
Changes the value in a cell until a formula using that cell reaches a value you specify (see Goal seek).
Opens the Scenarios Manager window, where you can add, edit, merge, and delete a series of scenarios, which are a way of playing “what if” with an Excel worksheet (see Scenarios).
The Auditing menu controls how formulas in a worksheet or workbook interrelate. It has five submenu choices, all of which involve colorful arrows that appear on your spreadsheet, pointing to cells that refer to each other.
Trace Precedents. Makes arrows point to a cell or cells that provide values for the formula in the selected cell. Useful if you’re looking for where data comes from.
Trace Dependents. Points to a cell or cells where the value in the selected cell is being used.
Trace Error. If the selected cell contains an error caused by a bad value in a cell that its formula references, an arrow identifies the offending cell.
Remove All Arrows. Removes all of the arrows drawn by auditing commands.
Show Auditing Toolbar. Hides or shows the Auditing toolbar.
Opens the Formula Calculator, which you can use to quickly create formulas in a neat touchpad format (see Using the Calculator to assemble formulas).
Opens the Conditional Sum Wizard that walks you through writing a formula to take the sum of specific values depending on other values in a list.
Opens the Macro window, a vestige of VBA macros that Office no longer can use. If you open a document created in an earlier version of Excel that contains macros, you can see them in this window—but not use them.
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