5 Useful Excel Shortcuts

How would you feel if you found out you were wasting hundreds of hours every year just by using time-consuming workarounds in Microsoft Excel? I’ll let you in on a secret—you probably are. Even if you feel like you only use Excel at a very basic level such as just to view information, there are likely some ways that you could improve your skills. Also, many of the same functions and shortcuts translate to other Microsoft apps such as Word and PowerPoint. Keep reading to learn how you could save yourself time using Excel.

View Several Excel Workbook Sheets Simultaneously

If you have an Excel workbook with more than one sheet of data, you may find it helpful to be able to view both sheets at the same time for comparison purposes. On the first sheet, go up to the Tool Bar and click on View and then New Window. This will create a duplicate window of the same file. You can easily stack the 2 windows by pressing the Windows key + Right Arrow key. This is pretty cool because changes you make in one window will also be applied to the other window(s).

Add a New Line Inside a Cell

If you’re using Excel to organize different blocks of text and you want it to improve the workbook’s readability, you may want to break up the text inside a single block by adding a new line to start a new paragraph. You can do this by clicking into the edit text box at the top of the page, moving your cursor to the end of the text where you want the new paragraph to appear, and pressing Alt + Enter.

Use Ctrl, Shift, and Alt to Navigate a Workbook Without the Mouse

Every Microsoft Excel pro knows it’s much faster to use the keyboard as much as possible because you can do pretty much everything you need to do in Excel with just the keyboard and you don’t have to waste hundreds of hours over time lifting your hand to travel between the mouse and the keyboard. You can take full advantage of the keyboard by navigating between cells using the Arrow keys, holding the Shift key and then an arrow key to select multiple different cells, Ctrl B or Ctrl I to bold or italicize text within a cell, Ctrl + Shift to quickly select a row or column of filled-in cells. You can even use the full Toolbar or Ribbon at the top of the window by using Alt. For example, pressing Alt + H will take you to the Home Toolbar, once there, pressing Alt + H again will allow you to highlight the cell you’ve selected.

Fill Out Blank Cells in Your Sheet

If you have a sheet with a few empty cells in between filled cells and you need to fill the empty cells with all of the same text, please don’t even consider copying and pasting into each cell individually. Instead, select all of the blank cells that you need to fill, press Ctrl + G, select Special… in the pop-up window, then select Blanks, select OK, type =, and then type the cell reference of the item you want to use to fill the blank cells, then press Ctrl + Enter. This will fill in all of the blank cells.

Select, Insert, and Remove an Entire Row or Column

To select an entire row, press Shift + Space. To select an entire column, press Ctrl + Space. To insert a new row or column, press Ctrl + + (Plus). This will bring up a dialogue box in which you can select Entire row or Entire column. There is a shortcut that allows you to avoid this dialogue box, select the entire column to insert a new column next to, and press Ctrl + Space, Ctrl + + (Plus). To use the shortcut to insert a row, select the entire row, and press Shift + Space, Ctrl + + (Plus). To remove an entire Row, select the entire Row and then Ctrl + - (Minus). To remove an entire column, select the entire column first, and then press Ctrl + -(Minus).

Excel Quickstart Guide

Hopefully, you can begin implementing these Excel tricks into your everyday work and start saving yourself some frustration and time so you can focus on moving your business. Continue sharpening your Microsoft Excel skills with the free New Horizons Excel Quick Start Guide below.

Download: Excel quickstart guide

Click the image below...