Cannot Use Dotted Diagonal Borders

Excel allows you to apply borders to cells, including with the cells. However, understanding the effects of the borders you may choose can be a challenge, as you discover in this tip.

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(Thanks to Ryszard Raciborski, James Woolley, Bud Beaty, Tomek Dluzniewski, Ron Solecki, Shreepad Gandhi, and Colin McCart for contributing to this tip.)

Identifying Values that Don't Follow a Specific Pattern

When you store textual information in a worksheet, it can be helpful to figure out if that information follows a pattern that is necessary for your needs. This tip looks at how you can validate whether a part number follows a specific pattern or not.

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(Thanks to Willy Vanhaelen for contributing to ths tip.)

Formatting Made Powerful

Discover one of the foundational building blocks of Excel. Custom formats are the basis for all cell-level formatting in Excel, and you can master their use. Display your data exactly and precisely as you want.

Password Protecting Specific Columns in a Worksheet

When you are developing a worksheet for others to use, you might want to protect some of the information in that worksheet. This tip shows you how you can make sure that someone cannot change specific ranges of cells unless they know a password that you devise.

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Returning Item Codes Instead of Item Names

The data validation capabilities of Excel are really handy when you want to limit what is put into a cell. However, you can't use data validation to return a value different than what the user selects. There are ways around this, though.

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Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

Converting a single URL into a hyperlink is easy. Converting hundreds or thousands can be much harder if you have to rely on manual methods. Here is a handy macro that can do the necessary conversion for you.

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Disabling All Function Keys Except One

Disabling function keys is rather easy to do when you rely on the OnKey method in a macro. This tip looks at how you can develop the macro to disable all function keys except one of them.

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This section is for those having problems making Excel behave. If Excel is giving you fits, feel free to submit your own Help Wanted question.

If you have a solution for the problems below, click the link after the problem to send us your answer. (All responses become the sole property of Sharon Parq Associates, Inc., and can be used in any way deemed appropriate.) If your response is used in a future issue, you will be credited for your contribution to the answer.

Generating a Unique ID Number

I want to create a unique ID for a membership database we are currently storing in Excel. Is there a formula that can do this easily?
—Amy Sedano (provide an answer for this Help Wanted question)