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Excel Table Cards for smartphones

Excel for iPhone and Android smartphones have a useful extension of Excel Tables called Cards.  It’s a better way to view tables on a smaller screen with larger text and easier editing.

Instead of scrolling right/left on the small screen, all the info for a single table row can be seen and edited as a Card.  New cards (rows) can be added, or rows/cards deleted.

Each Table Card is a row in an Excel table.

Enter Table Cards

Select inside any Excel Table then choose the Cards icon on the bottom row.

That opens the main Card view with the first few table columns visible.

Scroll up/down to see more cards/rows.

+  add a new table row / card.

Find – finds any rows/cards with matching text. The search is not case-sensitive and finds partial matches.  The number of cards/rows is discreetly show at right.

All the card details

Tap on any small card to open up the full card details, in other words all the columns in that row.

Text fields (cells) can be edited (or selected and copied).

Formula results are shown with a little ‘fx’ icon. The formula itself can’t be changed in Card view.

The ‘three dots’ menu, top-right, opens up more options:

  • Insert Above
  • Insert Below
  • Delete

What about Excel for Windows, Mac and iPad?

Excel Cards don’t exist in other versions of Excel, at least not in that name.

Excel for Windows has Form … which shows a dialog box of the current table row.  All the move, add, delete and find options are there.  For reasons passing understanding, Form isn’t on the Data or Table ribbons.

Neither Cards nor Form is available on Excel for Mac or iPad.

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