by Richard Stokes
This week’s tip comes courtesy of our NOC Manager, Steve Guthman – I do have to give credit where credit is due.
Spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets………..We all use them, some of us more than others and I think it’s safe to say that most of us only use about 10% of what Excel is actually capable of doing.
So, let’s say you’re the administrator for a medical practice and after hearing Penny Noyes’ presentation at the North Fulton MGMA’s January 2013 educational session you want to create a spreadsheet to track all of your payer contracts. You’ve just spent 15 minutes creating a table in Excel and you suddenly decide that it’s going to work better if the columns and rows were swapped and all the data along with it. Here’s what you do:
1) Highlight the table you’ve created and copy it.
2) Select either a blank cell somewhere on your existing spreadsheet or open a new spreadsheet.
3) Right click that cell with your mouse and a menu pops up with some ‘paste options’.
4) Move your mouse down to ‘paste special’ and left click it with your mouse.
5) Another menu pops up and in the bottom right you will see an option to select ‘transpose’. Check the box and click ‘OK’
Your new ‘transposed’ spreadsheet will suddenly appear and you just saved yourself a lot of time. As you can see – you’ll need to work with some of the formatting as not all of that comes over during the process. In the grand scheme of things though that’s the least of your worries compared to recreating the table from scratch.