How do I set defaults in excel?

You can save your tweaked in chart as default chart type; you need to save it as a custom chart type. To do that, follow these steps:
1. Create the chart that you want to use (your tweaked chart)
2. Right click on it and select “change chart type”.
3. It will open a pop up window like this; select from it “Set as default chart”.

You can generate a chart by keyboard shortcut “F11”. Hope this helps (since it’s Excel 2003, otherwise you can refer to this post). And here is another link.

@prasad Also, there’s another annoying tidbit this version does for some reason on this computer. When I have multiple spreadsheet files open, and I want to close one of them, instead ALL of the excel spreadsheets close at once. That’s really annoying. Is there any way around that?

Note that Excel has two “Minimize / Resize / Close” buttons in the top right corner of the screen. The one at the top is for “the Excel program”, the one below that is for “the file that is currently active” (unless you have the files tiled or otherwise on screen at the same time, in which case you’d have to note which file is active).

As @CWOTUS said.

If you are using Windows, then you can make use of windows taskbar (by default, it is at the bottom of the screen). All the files are minimized on the taskbar. You can right click the file you want to close and choose from options “close”.