Recently on Twitter someone asked security professionals which tools they use most for their day-to-day tasks. Someone said “Excel” and I found this very accurate. Excel is so versatile and universally installed, that I think it is really an imperative asset for most IT professions.
To make life even easier, working with shortcuts can greatly enhance efficiency. Three shortcuts that I find most useful and use really on a daily basis are these:
Convert to table
When exporting data as CSV from a SIEM, it is often a good idea to convert that data into an Excel table so that people can search and filter easily. To do this via a shortcut, just:
- Select all with Ctrl+A
- Convert to table with Ctrl+L
Autofit column width and row height
When you work with Excel, columns and rows will be resized and eventually the whole sheet might look quite confusing and not well structured.
With these two shortcuts you can quickly resize all cells to the “minimum required size” – gone are the days of oversize:
For column width:
- Ctrl+A
- Alt+H, O, I
For row height:
- Ctrl+A
- Alt+H, O, A