Basic Excel Skills:

To use XLCue you need a basic familiarity with Windows application in general and the Microsoft Excel application specifically.  These include launching applications. navigating directory trees using Open and Save As dialog boxes, selecting Excel worksheets, entering values in cells, scrolling, and using the context sensitive right-click menu.

Intermediate Excel Skills:

A few other relatively simple Excel operations are extremely useful for setting up the XLCue CueList for efficient Cue writing.

Resizing Columns:

It is often useful to resize a column.  To resize column K, click on the divider to the right of the letter K and drag to the left or right.  To resize columns K, L, and M identically, select all three columns by clicking on K, then holding the shift key while clicking on M.  Now that all three columns are selected, click and drag the edge of any of the three columns to simultaneously resize all three columns.

It may be useful to resize Control columns to efficiently use screen space and to show information such as longer words used as focus point values.

It may also be useful to resize Cue Info columns.  You may wish to increase the size of the Cue Notes column, or increase or decrease the size of the Cue Time column depending on the complexity of the values you commonly enter.

Showing/Hiding Rows and Columns:

Any fully selected column or row can be hidden with the "Hide" right-click menu option. 

You can tell that a row or column is hidden if the numbers or letters labeling rows and column are not consecutive.  A row or column can be unhidden by selecting an adjacent row or column and using the right-click menu option "Unhide".

Hiding rows or columns can be useful to conserve screen space- if you don't use Part Cues, the Part column can be hidden.  If you use only a small number of Palette entries, unneded Palette rows can be hidden.  In some cases you might even hide columns which are used as Intensity Controls but are not often edited.

In general, showing and hiding rows and columns will not affect any XLCue functionality  Do not hide the Cue Number column or any rows containing Cues.

Split Screen and Freeze Panes:

It is beyond the scope of this document to describe Excel's Window->Split Screen and Window->Freeze Panes menu options, but they are very useful in editing your CueList.

By default XLCue has the screen split and frozen at the junctions of Cue Info and Controls and the junction of Control setup and actual Cue rows.  You may wish to move the vertical line (between Cue Info and Controls) farther to the right, so that as you scroll right some Controls (probably Control Sets) remain visible.

Cell Selection & Navigation:

There are a variety of handy tricks for selecting single or multiple cells and moving the cursor using arrow keys, Ctrl, Shift, Home, and End.  Familiarity with these will allow you to effectively edit Cues without moving the mouse, which will generally be very efficient.