We thought we knew almost all there is to know about the features of Excel, but doing research for this post threw up a couple of surprises for us as well!

In this tutorial, we talk about five relatively unexplored areas of Excel, with one special twist - they're right in front of your eyes... always!

That's right, they've been staring at us all along, but we just haven't figured out how to make good use of them. Curious to find out more? Well, read on!

1) The Honey-I-Hid-The-Ribbon Button: The ribbon is a fairly useful interface, and it has gotten all of us fairly used to it. But what if you need a larger dose of screenspace? Well, the solution is fairly simple, really. Just click on the little arrow near the right top of your screen, and hey presto!, the ribbon is gone. It's still accessible, of course - all you need to do is click the tab headings on top - but it's now hidden from view. Clicking on that little arrow gets the ribbon back to its pristine glory.

2) The Formula Expander: Ever needed to write a nested if loop that looks bigger than Texas and California combined? You'll immediately identify with how much of a problem fitting that formula in the formula bar is - and how much of a problem tracking the entire formula at one go can be. Well, again, fret not, because there's a simple trick to making the formula box as big as you want it, and it involves clicking on a small button towards the right of your screen.

3) Page Layout and Page Breaks: Demarcating the print area on your spreadsheet is always a little tricky. Finding out which button to click in order to be able to set the print area in itself is a challenge. A coupe of easy places to start are hidden in the lower right corner of your Excel window - do give them a whirl the next time you want to wage war with the printer.

4) Freezing top rows (or columns): I'll bet you didn't know there was a button for that all along, now did you? Oh, but it's there all right! Right at the very top of the scroll bar lies an innocuous little button that you can drag down to freeze as many rows as you wish.And it's there for column as well, to the left and the right of the horizontal scroll bar - a pretty nifty way to quickly freeze as many rows and columns as you need. Convenience personified, this little feature.

5) Customize the Quick Access Toolbar: Wouldn't it be nice if some commands would show up  irrespective of which tab in the ribbon was active? Of course it would, and that is just what the Quick Access Toolbar does. Not only can you add standard commands such as email, print and so on, but you can also use the "More Commands" option to add whichever button (from any ribbon) you like.

There, those are our five there-but-you-can't-see-them tips for the day. Got any other hidden gems that we should be using more? Have at it in the comments!