Five Excel tools for cleaning up the spreadsheet somebody else built, starting with Go To Special

Audit first, then fix How-To Geek's Tony Phillips opens Find and Select and runs Go To Special to catch every blank cell before touching anything, marks duplicates and inconsistencies through Highlight Cells Rules in conditional formatting so the underlying data stays as it was, breaks crammed cells apart with TEXTSPLIT on a comma, a pipe or a space and pastes the result as values before deleting the source, and saves Excel tables and named ranges built through Create from Selection for last, once the sheet is clean enough to deserve them.

Search, then re-point How-To Geek's Arol Wright notes that a cancelled US number usually re-enters the reuse pool within 45 to 90 days, and that Princeton researchers found 100 of 259 recycled numbers already tied to credentials leaked online, leaving a new holder needing only the texted code; his audit searches your email for phrases like verification code, works down from the carrier, email, Apple or Google account, bank and payment services, swaps the number out for an authenticator app, a passkey or a hardware key, changes it inside messaging apps using their own change-number tools before the line goes dark, checks the secondary services from pharmacies to airlines to delivery apps, and deletes the dormant accounts instead of updating them.

Three switches, one menu MakeUseOf's Pankil Shah turns off Animation effects and Transparency effects under Settings, Accessibility, Visual effects, then searches for adjust the appearance and performance of Windows and picks Adjust for best performance, or takes the Custom option to keep Smooth edges of screen fonts and Show thumbnails instead of icons, and pairs it with Best performance under Settings, System, Power and battery; he is honest about the trade, that the interface looks a bit weird at first, that the gain lands on older or budget machines rather than new high-end ones, that the power mode costs a laptop battery life, and that the hidden Ultimate Performance plan is not worth its heat.

Three names, three values MakeUseOf's Afam Onyimadu sets browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false so the address bar shows the whole address, which makes a redirect or a local page easy to read and compare, sets browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false so closing the final tab leaves the window standing, and sets browser.urlbar.decodeURLsOnCopy to true so a copied link arrives readable rather than percent-encoded; he prints the trade in each case, that the first is purely visual and changes nothing about security, that the second costs you a quick way to quit if you used it deliberately, and that some services still expect the encoded form.