Join Dennis Taylor for an in-depth discussion in this video Helpful keystroke shortcuts, part of Excel Tips Weekly.
- [Instructor] On this worksheet called Keystroke Shortcuts, we've got eight different keystroke shortcuts, for the most part unrelated. I think you'll find them helpful and they're going to make your day to day use of Excel more efficient. Shift + F11, insert a new worksheet to the left of the current one. I'm going to go to the Employees sheet, just one sheet to the right as I click it. A lot of you know you can click a little plus just to the right of your last worksheet at the bottom of your screen. That'll add a new worksheet to the right. We can also add one to the left. And sometimes the issue is you just want to do it quickly.
So by pressing shift + F11, keep an eye on the Employees tab at the bottom, we're adding a new worksheet to the left of the current one. And I'm doing that because I will be copying some data from this list. I want to copy data related to the Admin Training group. To make this simpler, I'm going to hide rows two through six, right click and Hide. I also don't want to be copying the column H and I entries here, so I'll hide those as well too. And I simply want to highlight this data here and copy it.
Just for the Admin Training group. So I press control + c. I go to that new sheet and paste it with control + v, but I'm getting everything. I'm getting the job rating, the salary, and the people from the other group and so on. So what do I really want to do here? Phrased a different way, I want to copy here just the visible cells. There's a keyboard shortcut, it's alt + semicolon. There's a slight, subtle difference on the screen. But when I press control + c it's a bit more obvious.
We want to copy this data, there it is. We're copying this now, think of it in chunks. Then when we go to Sheet1, paste it off here to the right for contrast, control + v. We're not getting that other department's records in here and we're only getting the columns that we want. If it's a filtered list, you don't worry about this, but in other lists, if you've hidden columns and or rows and you copy the data, you're going to get everything. Select the data, press alt + semicolon to get the visible cells only. Then do the copy paste.
Alright, keystroke shortcuts. Control + G. Go to a cell address, same as F5. Sometimes you're working with data, big list here. Last time I was working with it yesterday, it was around row 500. I want to get down to row 500 quickly. Function key, F5 or control + G. Either way, type in the address, say it's a500, enter. Strictly keyboard here. Control + G or F5, type in the address, press enter. Next shortcut, sometimes you can zoom in or out, not all keyboards, but try it.
It's a keystroke alternative for zooming. Hold down control and alt, hit the plus key. If you've got two plus keys, either one will work. You're zooming in. Or control + alt + minus zoom out. It's going to be handy at times. Tip number five here, control + one activates the format cells dialog box. We're working with some data here perhaps, we want to change the format of this column or that column. Maybe I'll click column J here. Control + one activates the format cell's dialog box.
I might want to change the look of that, use a different format here. Maybe the same kind of thing in column E. Control + one gets us there quickly. All these different date formats we might want to consider. Many of you know there are lots of formatting features not available on the home tab and control + one gets us into that format dialog box quickly. Back to our Keystroke Shortcuts. Control + period. Anytime you've got a bunch of cells highlighted, you can move around the corners. Now, shown in a vacuum like this, in a non contextual way, this doesn't seem like it's very valuable at all.
I'm pressing control + period. That's all it does. But it's really handy when you're copying formulas. For example, if I'm changing this formula here, I'll double click and change this. We're going to change this to round these to the nearest whole number. I'll put in a zero out here instead of a minus two. A zero, press control + enter, double click to copy this down the column. But did it get copied all the way? We'll press control + period to see. Yup, there it is all the way down to the bottom, control + period. In this case, it only moves us top to bottom because it's not a rectangular range, but control + period simply moves the active cell around the corners of a range.
Back to our Keystroke Shortcuts. Control + W, we're ready to close this file, we'll press control + W. I don't really want to close it here, but that's what we get here that way, or Cancel. We could also use control + F4 does the same thing. Here too, I don't want to do that, so I Cancel. Control + F1, unhide the ribbon icons. We're displaying this data for others, we don't need to see the icons for a while. Control + F1 hides them all. We can get that back later with control + F1. So, different keystroke shortcuts.
Eight different keystroke shortcuts that are going to make your life simpler and easier as you work with Excel on a daily basis.
Author
Updated
3/2/2021Released
1/16/2015Note: Because this is an ongoing series, viewers will not receive a certificate of completion.
Skill Level Intermediate
Duration
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Video: Helpful keystroke shortcuts