Using Undo and Redo

- [Instructor] When working with Excel, sometimes you'll make a mistake, I know I do. And from time to time, we've got a real lifesaving feature available, it's called Undo, and it's got a companion called Redo. So, imagine I'm a novice user of Excel, for whatever reason, I've got these cells highlighted, and I want to get rid of the word Sales. I don't really have to do that, I could type over it, but I'm thinking it's the only cell there. If I press delete, shouldn't it get rid of the word Sales? It looks different than the other ones to the right. I press delete, well obviously, in retrospect, I don't want to do that.

So what do we do? Two different ways, there is a keystroke shortcut, Control + Z, I could press that now. At the top of the screen in the Quick Access Toolbar, you'll have an Undo button, it's a counterclockwise arrow. When you slide over it, you'll see the word Undo, followed by the action that was taken most recently, in this case, clear, and those keystroke shortcut. So I'll click it. And, Undo can remember up to 100 of your last steps. Now, it's highly unlikely you'd ever want to go back that far, and most Excel users I think, only occasionally go back three or four steps.

If you Undo more than you wanted to Undo, the category to the right here is called Redo. Now, I just undid the clear, but I just undid falls into this category of Redo. So I could Undo the Undo, or redo, do it that way. The keystroke shortcut for Redo is Control + Y. Now as it turns out, of course, I would want to keep that so I'll press Control + Z, or that Undo arrow at the top of the screen. So it's a really handy feature. It doesn't work for every single command, although it works for most of the commands.

I'd say well over 90%. One category of commands that you can't Undo relate to sheet tabs. Now you might not be too familiar with these, but at the bottom of the screen, if I right click on the current worksheet, which is called Undo Redo, I could delete the sheet, and I cannot Undo that. Rename, well I can't really Undo it but I can come back and change the name. So these features don't fall under the category of actions that we can Undo. And they're also some features on the View tab like Freeze Panes, some of these we can't Undo, but we can certainly take other actions to, in effect, come back to the same place that we want to come back to.

So, it's a valuable feature, and no question, different times we make mistakes and Undo, and to lesser extent Redo, are really valuable. There could be one example too, where you might create a Chart that looks a certain way, you'll change the Chart, you might want to sorta bounce back and forth between the two, sometimes you use Control + Z and Control + Y back and forth as kind of a toggle. Or you could be using those buttons as well. But no question, a feature you'll use widely in Excel.