The power of Save As and your Excel spreadsheet

I often tell people that F12 is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts for any of the Microsoft products, including Excel, and certainly it is one of the ones that has been most useful to me. But why is Save As so important?

It’s simply a way of saving your spreadsheet or document in another way. This could either be with another name, or possibly into a different format (either a previous version of the software, or perhaps in an entirely different form such as pdf or .txt)

For me it’s using it to save a spreadsheet as another name which has been so useful, this gives the opportunity to have an “Original” version of a spreadsheet to return to whilst you try out some new functions and take your analysis in different ways with no fear of harming your source data. You can always return to the first version if needed.

Just a word of cation though, firstly make sure your new file names are meaningful and secondly that you don’t get click happy using F12 too often, ending up with multiple copies with helpful titles as “ORIGINAL Version 1 FINAL” or “Wednesday version 3 FINAL original use this one”.

Do you Save As and find it useful? What’s your favourite shortcut? Do leave me a comment below