1.5 Using shortcut keys in Excel
One useful task in Excel is to learn to use shortcut keys. This will speed up your Excel projects, especially when working under pressure in a professional environment.
Some shortcut keys are listed below. Try some of these out while reading the list.
Table 1 Navigating inside and between worksheets
| Arrow keys | Move around the spreadsheet. |
| Page Down/Page Up | Move screen down or up. |
| Ctrl + Arrow keys | Move to the edge of a region. This is useful for navigating large blocks of data, particularly with the Ctrl + Shift + Arrow selection functionality. |
| Home | Move to the beginning of a row. |
| Ctrl + Home | Move to the beginning of a worksheet. This is most useful if you have multiple worksheets and want to prepare a nice-looking workbook, by cycling through all worksheets pressing Ctrl + Page Down and Ctrl + Home for each sheet, which quickly puts the cursor in the upper-left corner. |
| |
| |
| |
Table 2 Data selection
| Shift + Space | Select the entire row at the cursor position. |
| |
| Ctrl + A | Select the entire worksheet or the data-containing area. Press Ctrl + A a second time to select the entire worksheet. |
| |
| Shift + Arrow key | Extend the selection by one cell. This is one of the most useful shortcuts. |
| Ctrl + Shift + Arrow key | Extend the selection to the last cell with content in row or column. You can do this with the Page Up/Down keys. |
| |
| Esc | Cancel selection. |
Table 3 Editing
| Ctrl + C | Copy active selection. |
| Ctrl + X | Cut active selection. Think carefully about whether you want to copy or cut a selection before pasting in each situation, because cell references in copied selections will point to other cells and not the original references when pasted. |
| Ctrl + V | Paste active selection. |
| Ctrl + Z | Undo last action. |
| Ctrl + Y | Redo last action. |
| |
| |
| Alt + Enter | Start a new line in the same cell when entering text. |
| Ctrl + D | Copy above cell down. |
| |
| |
| |
| |
Table 4 Formulas and special functions
| Ctrl + Shift + Enter | Enter an array formula. Must have a range selected first. (This is shown here only for reference and will be explained later.) |
| Shift + F3 | Display the ‘Insert Function’ dialog. |
| F4 | When editing a cell reference (e.g. ‘H5’), pressing F4 makes this reference absolute (e.g., ‘$H$5’). Pressing F4 repeatedly makes only row or column absolute. |
| F9 | Force re-calculation of worksheets. It can be used to calculate part of a formula, when selecting part of formula and pressing F9, this evaluates the selected part. |
| Shift + F9 | Calculate the active worksheet. |
| |
| Ctrl + S | Save the current workbook. Extremely useful for the occasional power outage or computer crash. |
| |
OpenLearn - Data analysis: visualisations in Excel
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.
