The top five unknown but useful keyboard shortcuts

- Excel has many keystroke shortcuts. Some of the not so well-known shortcuts are displayed in a blue box on the right side of this worksheet. Let's imagine we're viewing this worksheet right now, and we want to see more data. Maybe some of my coworkers are looking over my shoulder, trying to scan this data. We'd just like to see more records on the screen. We're currently seeing 25 rows right now. I want to essentially hide the entire ribbon. In other words, go to full screen. There used to be a command on the View tab called full screen. It's no longer there.

We can press control, shift, F1. It hides the entire ribbon menu system instead of 25 rows, we're now seeing 32 rows. Of course, that will vary depending on your zoom factor. How do we get back to normal? This is what we sometimes call a toggle switch. Control, shift, F1, we're back to normal. At other times when working with a feature like this, you might want to retain at least the ribbon tabs. For example, the words File, Home, Insert, but hide the icons below it.

So if we simply want to hide the other icons, it's control, F1, no shift key this time. That too is what we call a toggle, control F1, we're back to normal. Control F1 simply retains the ribbon tabs, but not the icons below them. Control, shift, F1 also hides the ribbon tabs, so essentially it's full screen. Control, shift, F1, control, shift, F1, back and forth. I'm ready to print this, or almost ready. I want to get a quick look at print preview. It's simply control, F2.

There it is, I check it out. I might do other things here regarding printing. Let's say for the moment, all I wanted to do is to get a brief look at how this is going to appear on paper. Looks okay for now, I'll get back to this. Simply press escape to get out of print preview. I need to do some formatting, particularly on columns D and E. These should have been formatted, they haven't been taken care of. So, I'm going to click column D and go into Format Cells. The Home tab, of course, has many many different formatting choices, but not all formatting choices.

Any time you need to get to features that are not found on the Home tab, with regard to formatting, select the cell or cells and press control, one. It activates the Format Cells dialog box. It doesn't necessarily pick the tab that you want, and you can certain adjust that quickly and easily, but in this case we do want to use the number pad and go down to Special here. I'll simply double click Phone Number and we've got that all straightened out. Do the same thing with social security here, click column E, control, one, same general location, Number tab, Special, Social Security Number.

So we've cleaned up those formats nicely. So any time you need to get to Format Cells, to get to some of those other features in formatting, it's control one. Now, as it turns out, I might want to copy some of this data. I'd like to copy information about the admin training group here. Before I do that, I want to note that Phil Parsons here has left. We keep the names in this list for a while, but I don't want his name in the list that I'm about to copy, so I'm going to right click on row 15 and simply hide that.

Furthermore, when I do this copy, I don't want to copy the social security numbers. I'm going to be hiding column E. So I'll right click column E and hide that. I don't want to be copying these ADC people right here. I do want that top row, though, so we'll hide rows two through six. Drag across those, right click and hide. So, here's the problem, not always foreseen. I'd like to take this data here, as I see it, and copy it onto a different sheet. So I'm ready to copy, I press control C.

I'll jump out to an empty sheet, say sheet two here. I'll paste the data, control V. I'm disappointed because, even though I can't see the actual numbers, I am seeing social security number here. Making column A wider, I realize here's Phil Parsons. Furthermore, all these ADC people that were in hidden rows, they're out here as well too. This did not do what I wanted it to do. In other words, in highlighting the data, what I really wanted to copy was the visible cells only. You can see the keystroke shortcut listed to the right there.

It's alt, semicolon. Would you have ever guessed that? Probably not. So, I've got my data highlighted. I want to select the visible cells only, I'll press alt, semicolon, then control C. The visual on the screen pretty much suggests that I'm going to be copying six different chunks of data as a unit, rather than in one solid cluster. So, the data is ready to be copied. I'll just over to sheet two. This time we'll do the pasting off to the right. We should see fewer rows and no social security column.

Control V to paste, there we are. No social security column, there's no Philip in there either. We're not seeing those ADC people. Now, if you didn't know about that keystroke shortcut by the way, it would take you a long time to find out a command way. There is, it's buried deep in the menu system on the Home tab way off to the right. Find and Select, Go To Special and Visible cells only. So instead of going through that multi-step sequence, simply press alt, semicolon. If this is a filtered list, you won't have to worry about this at all.

If you copy data from a filtered list, you automatically get the visible cells only. Now, if you did want to activate a filter. Probably in this case what I would do is bring back the hidden rows. Click in the upper left corner, right click any row, and Unhide. That unhides all hidden rows. For columns, also click in the upper left corner, right click any column, Unhide. All hidden columns reemerge. If I want to activate filtering at any time, it's control, shift, L. Why L? Well, we're not sure, but L is a significant letter in the word filter.

You'll just have to remember it I suppose, or write it down. That's handy at times, particularly if you do a lot of filtering. Saves you a few clicks on the menu system. This also is the way to deactivate filtering if you're finished filtering for a while. Control, shift, L. So we've seen quite a few different keystroke shortcuts you might not have known, but very handy to make you a more efficient Excel user.