Microsoft Excel as a construction cost estimating platform provides a lot of raw calculating and formatting power through its standard functions. But there are also many opportunities to take advantage of lesser-known shortcuts, functions and macros that can automate and speed up estimating operations.

Most people think of the formulas that do the calculating as the workhorses of spreadsheets. However all formulas are rooted in functions and the more of those you know, the more Excel savvy you become.

This article provides 10 tips for improving both your efficiency as an excel user and the quality of the documents that you produce. The three tips in Part 1 (below) cover basic keyboard shortcuts for manipulating test and inserting symbols. The next four tips, in Part 2, provide hints for performing common construction cost estimating calculations. The final three tips, covered in Part 3, show how saving macros, linking worksheets and importing and viewing PDF files can increase Excel's flexibility.

In addition, there is a companion Excel workbook to this article called Microsoft Excel Construction Cost Estimating Techniques. It includes all the instructions for most of these construction cost estimating techniques along with the formulas that were used in the creation of the examples.

Tip #1: Manipulating text

While you work you make decisions about what to put in upper case, lower case and title case (upper case letter at the beginning of each word). While you work you may also do a number of copying and pasting operations from sources where the format of the text does not match the format you want the pasted text to match. Then, too, while you work, you may later have a number of column or row headings that would look better, or use up less room, if they were formatted differently. The UPPER, LOWER and PROPER functions are quick ways to manipulate text into the format you desire.

To use these functions:

1. Select a cell near the text you want to change: Type =
2. Type the function you want LOWER, UPPER, or PROPER
3. TYPE the cell ID that has the text you want changed
4. Hit ENTER
5. Here’s how it would look if you wanted to change the contents of cell D3 to lower case: =LOWER(D3)

Ah, you say, but the result is not in the cell where I want the text to appear. No problem.

1. RIGHT CLICK on the cell with the changed text and choose COPY
2. SELECT the cell with the original text
3. RIGHT CLICK and choose PASTE SPECIAL
4. SELECT VALUES when the dialog box pops up
5. CHOOSE OK

The changed text now appears in the original cell.

Tip #2: Using keyboard shortcuts to speed things up

When working in Excel, and in many Windows programs, there are a lot of operations that can be speeded up if you know the keyboard shortcuts. Always reaching for the mouse and aiming it at an icon or menu item to accomplish tasks not only slows you down, but it’s hard on the arms and wrists.

For example, don’t overlook the ARROW keys for navigating, and if you want to highlight, or SELECT something, just hold down SHIFT while you use the ARROW keys to highlight the item.

For the following operations, hold down CTRL while typing the other letter.

• To make something BOLD or un-BOLD, use CTRL + b
• To ITALISIZE or un-ITALISIZE, use CTRL + i
• To UNDERLINE or un-UNDERLINE, use CTRL + u
• Finally, CTRL + c COPIES and CTRL + v PASTES

Tip #3: Easily inserting special symbols

Especially when working with construction cost estimating documents, there are many times when you want to insert fractions as text items. In a spreadsheet program like Excel this sometimes causes strange results if the cell isn’t formatted correctly.

At least for a few fractions there is a simple technique. For these operations hold down ALT while typing the numbers on the numeric keypad.

• For ¼ use ALT + 0188
• For ½ use ALT + 0189
• For ¾ use ALT + 0190
• If you need a degree symbol (75°), use ALT + 0176
• The © symbol is ALT + 0169
• The ® symbol is ALT + 0174
• For a ± sign use ALT + 0177

*** Part 2 of this article, Expanding Excel for construction: Calculations, provides hints for performing common construction cost estimating calculations such as the total number of work days in a project (minus holidays) and whether a project is over budget.