Don’t be limited by how fast your hand can move to the mouse! Check out these shortcuts for nine ways to get your hands up to speed with your brain. There’s actually a lot more than nine, but it’s always good to under-sell and over-deliver!

1. The Control key

Holding Ctrl plus a direction arrow will jump you to the extremities of the table you are in; absolutely invaluable for re-arranging data.

The effects of Ctrl + Up & Ctrl + Right from the middle of a table)

Some additional control based table shortcuts

and

Travel to the top left of your table. Move to the bottom right of your table.

and

Navigate through the list of worksheets (tabs).

2. The Menu key

The key between the right Windows & Ctrl keys is essentially the same as right clicking the mouse. Although there are more shortcuts to avoid the need to right click a cell (and I’m about to cover them), it’s important to know all the different ways to open a menu since remembering a few hundred shortcuts isn’t practical unless you work with Excel professionally.

3. Formatting Data

Ctrl + Shift + and the ‘number’ keys offer a quick ways to define formats. Here’s a quick summary:

+

• 1 = Format -> Number

• 2 = Format -> General

• 4 = Format -> Currency

• 5 = Format -> Percent (although it isn’t converted so 5 = 500% not 5%)

4. Formatting Layouts

You can apply basic formatting with Ctrl + Shift + too, ideal for working on drafts.

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• F -> Change font

• P -> Change font size

• 7 -> Apply a single pixel border

• _ (underscore) -> strip all borders

5. Manipulating Tables

Although you can use Tip #1 to select a custom range, there are additional shortcuts to manipulate rows/columns.

= select row

= select column

= select all table cells in this direction

6. Editing Cells

Ctrl based shortcuts also work whilst editing a cell, Ctrl + Right or Left will skip to the end of the current word, Home & End (without Ctrl) also allow you to skip to the extremities of the cell.

Beginning a cell with = followed by apostrophe ( =’ ) allows you to define that the cell contents are text, so Excel will leave the contents exactly as you enter them.

7. D on’t f orget t he A lt k ey!

If you take a quick look at the menus at the top of Excel, you’ll notice most of the options have a letter underlined (e.g. View) – You can open these menus just by holding Alt key and the corresponding letter.

This isn’t just useful for menus either… most Wizards also allow Alt based shortcuts.

8. AutoFilters

You can apply an AutoFilter using a super quick combination of the menus and hotkeys. Just select the top cell of the column you want to filter, then use ALT + D to open the Data menu, then hit F twice. Voila!

9. Final nugget of information

Two menu options that people have trouble locating.

Editing sheet details

Importing Data