Excel Level-Up: Day 1

Navigation by Keyboard

To work fast in Excel, you must not rely too much on your mouse. Learn to navigate in Excel using keyboard will save your time tremendously. It could be difficult in the beginning, but it will certainly be paid off in long run. The following are some useful shortcuts for navigation.

Level 0: To move to the next cell, I’m sure you know we will be using the [Up], [Down], [Left] and [Right] keys.

Level 1: Slightly harder, use [Control] + [Up] / [Down] / [Left] / [Right] to move to the edge of the data range. This is particularly useful if you are constantly working with big lists or tables.

Imagine you have a table with 25 columns and 10,000 rows.

How do you move from the top of the list to the bottom of the list?

Scroll down?

Nope.

Use [Control] +[Down]

How do you move from the first column to the last column?

Press [Right] continuously.

Nope.

Use [Control] + [Right]

Level 2: If you would like to select cells, use [Shift] + [Up] / [Down] / [Left] / [Right]. No more dragging hassle in the future!

Level 3: Even slightly harder, now if you combine [Control] and [Shift], you can select cells faster. For example,

If you want to select the whole row of a table: [Control] + [Shift] + [Right]

If you want to select a column of a table: [Control] + [Shift] + [Down]

Try applying these tricks in your work today! You might not see the results immediately as it require some practice, but I assure you that your colleague will be impressed. 

Go back to the intro Excel Level-Up: Introduction !
Proceed to the next awesome trick: Excel Level-Up: Day 2