Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Decide what happens when you start the Excel application.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Controlling Your Start Experience
When you’d like to customize what Excel does when started
Instructions
Make sure you are in Excel’s “Start Screen” view
- If you are already in Excel’s “Start Screen”, you are in the correct place
- If you are in an Excel workbook, click on the File Tab
Change Excel’s start-up behavior
- Go to Options -> General and scroll to the bottom
- Toggle the “Show the Start screen when this application starts”
- Checked: Will open the Start screen
- Unchecked: Will open a blank workbook
- Click OK
On a Mac
To modify your start experience, go to Excel > Preferences, and click the General icon. Under “Settings” you can control whether or not you see the welcome screen by clicking “Show Workbook Gallery when opening Excel.”
Login to download- 00:04 Let's talk a little bit about your Excel startup experience.
- 00:08 By default,
- 00:09 when you open Excel you'll be taken into a screen that looks similar to this.
- 00:13 And I say similar because this does seem to be one of those areas that Microsoft is
- 00:17 constantly trying to tweak to make it touch friendly for devices,
- 00:21 a little bit easier to work through, and things like that.
- 00:24 So what it looks like may change.
- 00:27 But the key thing is that we've got a Home tab right off the top here,
- 00:30 and it's got a big New blank workbook button.
- 00:33 If we can expand this though, and we can see Blank Workbook,
- 00:36 if your organization has created any templates of their own, like we have,
- 00:40 you'll notice that we actually have those listed here.
- 00:43 In addition, Microsoft will also suggest some of their own created templates here,
- 00:47 which may or may not line up with what you see here,
- 00:50 depending on what they're deploying as you're working with Excel.
- 00:53 I'm going to collapse this back down so
- 00:55 that we have our big New blank workbook button.
- 00:58 You'll notice there's a Search to look for different files.
- 01:00 There's also a Recommended for You section.
- 01:03 And under this section here, if you expand it, now I'm going to blur out all my files
- 01:07 of course, but this uses some algorithms that Microsoft has to try and
- 01:10 figure out which files are the most important to you.
- 01:13 And it will serve those up as kind of a quick hit to get directly into what you
- 01:17 want to start working on again.
- 01:19 Let me collapse that down.
- 01:21 The next thing you'll see is that you've got a Recent list that shows you the most
- 01:24 recently listed files that you've actually worked on.
- 01:27 We have a pinned selection.
- 01:29 And if you actually mouse over an individual file,
- 01:32 you can actually find a pin icon where you can pin it to this particular list.
- 01:36 And you also have a section for files that are shared with you, so that if somebody
- 01:40 actually shares them using the different sharing features in Office,
- 01:44 they'll show up on this list.
- 01:46 We also have on the left hand side a New button.
- 01:49 This one here is focused on creating your blank workbooks or
- 01:52 your personal organization's templates, or a massive gallery of templates
- 01:56 from Microsoft that they think that you might find useful.
- 01:59 Finally we have an Open section here, which lists our different drives and
- 02:04 locations down the left hand side, as well as our workbooks or
- 02:08 folders that we might actually want to dig into or reopen as well.
- 02:12 Now this is great and everything else, but I actually find this really intrusive.
- 02:16 Because, when I open Excel, I want it to open directly into a blank spreadsheet.
- 02:21 I don't want to have to be slowed down by something where I gotta click to open
- 02:24 another file.
- 02:25 I can always go File > Open, if I'm in a blank workbook.
- 02:28 So here's what I'm going to do.
- 02:30 I'm going to control this by going down to Options on the left hand side.
- 02:35 This will open up the Excel Options screen for me,
- 02:38 which you can actually find under File > Options.
- 02:42 I'll show you that in a little bit.
- 02:44 If I take a look at the general tab and I scroll all the way to the bottom,
- 02:48 what I'm going to do is I'm going to uncheck this box to show the start
- 02:51 screen when the application starts.
- 02:53 And what's going to happen now is I'm going to click OK, and
- 02:57 I'm going to restart Excel.
- 03:00 And once Excel is restarted, it opens directly into a blank workbook, and
- 03:04 that's perfect.
- 03:05 If I need to go and open another workbook, I can always go to the File screen,
- 03:10 which will take me back to these similar screens that you saw before, with Home,
- 03:15 New, and Open.
- 03:16 In addition, you'll notice all the way down the bottom we've got Options,
- 03:20 if we do really want that piece, that nice start screen, you can always come back and
- 03:24 actually check the box, and say OK.
- 03:26 And at that point when you restart Excel you'll be taken back into
- 03:29 that start screen.
- 03:30 Personally for me though I am much more of a fan of opening Excel and
- 03:34 coming directly into a workbook, because I create new stuff all the time,
- 03:39 and I don't want to be slowed down by having to click just one extra button.
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