Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Most Useful Excel Keyboard Shortcuts”.
This Excel tutorial covers the most useful keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Excel, and I want to start with two really common keyboard shortcuts. These are usable in almost every program, but I still think they’re important and useful for you to know. The first is ctrl s. You hold the ctrl key and tap the letter S and when you do that it saves your spreadsheet, and so it’s the equivalent of going up here and clicking the Save button or clicking file and save next, we have control P. You hold ctrl, you tap P.
That brings up the print options in Microsoft Excel and now you can just click the print button and print out. Your document like I said those are pretty commonplace, but I think if you don’t know them, you need to know them. Next, we have ctrl T and what ctrl T does is it turns the selected cells into a table? You can see that I already have a table here on the screen. This is a list of synth-pop and new wave bands and their most recently released album and also their current price. On amazon.com and you can see it’s a table, you can tell that it’s a table because it’s formatted in a special way the colors alternate, and things like that. You can just tell that this data is meant to go together in this table and I can create a table like this simply by holding ctrl and tapping T. So, for example, over here on sheet number three, I’m gon na click here is the data that I would like to turn into a table. All I have to do is click and drag to highlight the range that I would like to turn into a table.
I release the mouse, and now I hold ctrl and tap T Excel asks where’s the data it seems to already know, but if it happened to be wrong, I could change that my table has headers. Yes, it does by our amount spent date. But if I didn’t have headers, I could uncheck that and just click, OK and look what it did. It automatically turned that data into a table, so ctrl T a really useful tool that I use quite a bit jumping back to sheet one the rest of the excel keyboard, shortcuts that I’m going to show you have to do with getting around in your Excel spreadsheet And in many cases that is one of the hardest, most tedious parts of using Excel. I constantly have to navigate around the data in my spreadsheet, so I’ll need to go up to the top to make changes, and then I need to go down to the bottom, and this is a pretty small spreadsheet. To be honest. But if you had two thousand records, if you had five thousand or ten thousand records in your spreadsheet, imagine having to jump around from the top of your spreadsheet to the bottom and vice versa. And then also, sometimes it can be hard to click and drag and select the right data.
If I wanted to select this entire row, sometimes that’s kind of difficult and I might be inaccurate with how I do it same with a column. If I wanted to select this whole column, sometimes that’s hard to do so. Let’S take a look at some keyboard shortcuts that can make doing these tasks a lot easier and quicker, and the first example is whenever you want to go to the top left corner of your data in a spreadsheet, simply use the keyboard shortcut control home, so hold The control key tap home and look what it did. It took me up to the top of my data, but not only that it actually went to the upper left corner, so that cell is actually highlighted cell a2.
In this case, because that’s where the data begins so ctrl home is very useful. Let’S look at the opposite example a lot of times you need to get to the bottom of your data, to do that, you hold ctrl and tap the end key and notice. What that did that took me to the lower right corner of my data in the spreadsheet? Now I’m gon na tap control home again to show you yet another way to get down to the bottom of the data. But this one is a little bit different and that is hold ctrl and tap the down arrow on your keyboard.
When you do that, it takes you down to the very bottom of your data, but notice that, instead of being at the lower right, it just took me to the very bottom record and because I was already in column a it took me to a 46 in This case, but let’s try it again: I’m gon na go control home to get back up to the top. Let’S say I’m in cell e2 and I hold ctrl and tap the down arrow notice. What it did it just took me to the very bottom record. It didn’t move me to the left or to the right, but rather I stayed in the same column. This next keyboard shortcut doesn’t have to do with moving around in side the sheet, but rather from one sheet to another.
So right now, I’m in sheet one – and I have these all out of order – that’s okay, but she won it’s actually the third sheet listed. If I would like to go to sheet three, all I have to do is click on it. If I want to go to sheet two, I just click on that and back to sheet 1, but really one of the main purposes of keyboard shortcuts is to keep your hands on the keyboard anytime.
You have to take your hands off the keyboard, to use the mouse or to do anything else for that matter. You are now less efficient using Excel, and so that’s why we have keyboard shortcuts to keep our hands on the keyboard. So we can do the work. We need to do so instead of using the mouse to click on sheet 3 or sheet 2.
All I have to do is hold the ctrl key and tap the page up key and look what happened. It moved me back to this sheet. If I tap it again, control page up, it moves me back to the previous sheet before that. What about the opposite case? If you want to move to the right to the next sheet, you hold ctrl and tap page down and then page down again and I’m back where I started so those last few keyboard shortcuts.
I think you’ll find them to be pretty useful and pretty helpful in navigating around your spreadsheet and quickly getting to the top or the bottom or to a different sheet. This next keyboard shortcut is kind of fun to do and kind of interesting, but I don’t use it that often to be honest with you, but what it is is ctrl D and you use ctrl D to copy an item down. So, for example, each of these amazing synth-pop or new wave bands has more than one CD listed in this spreadsheet, except for Brandon flowers, but he has had other releases besides the amazing CD, the desired effect that came out a year or two ago. So if I would like to add more entries for Brandon Flowers, I could click on that cell copy and paste it or I could click on it and use the autofill handle to just fill it in like that.
But instead I’m gon na use ctrl D, and to do that first, I need to select what I want to copy brandon flowers in this case and then drag down as far as I want it to be copied. So I want it to go down to 60. Then I just hold ctrl tap D and because I’m in a table I’m getting this warning, but don’t worry about that. I just click okay and it added Brandon Flowers several times to this spreadsheet. So, like I said, ctrl D, it’s kind of fun I like to use it and I find it to be helpful, but I don’t use it that often so now. Let’S look at the last three keyboard shortcuts that I’m gon na recommend that everybody learn and the last three I’ll deal with selecting data in excel. You have to select data, often in order to copy and paste in order to change the font or the formatting or the alignment of the data in your spreadsheet. There’S lots of examples and lots of times when you need to select data and of course you could do that.
The manual way you could just click and drag to highlight and select the text and that’s a good way to do it. But let’s look at some shortcuts. If you’ve clicked on your spreadsheet, you can hold ctrl and tap a and it should select all now, if you’re in a table notice that it selects everything that’s in the table and it does not include any information. That’S outside the table, however, if I hold ctrl and tap a again, then it does select everything, so you can see that that’s indeed what happened.
However, in this case, I just want to select the table so control a selects, just the table, I’ll use, ctrl C, which of course is copy and then I’ll go to – let’s say sheet 2 and I’m going to hold ctrl and tap V for paste and it Pastes it in that table so control a selects everything unless you’re inside a table, then it selects everything in the table, but nothing more. But again you could do ctrl a twice to then select everything. Alright. Next up, we have control space and control. Space is for selecting an entire column, put the cursor wherever you want it to be: hold control, tap space, the entire column is selected, and then you can copy paste it as needed or change its font or alignment or whatever you need to do. Finally, we have Shift space. This is our first time using shift instead of control, but you hold shift tap space and it selects the entire row. So I hope that you found these keyboard shortcuts to be useful.
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