Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Excel

Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Excel

Why use keyboard shortcuts in Excel?

Excel offers a series of shortcuts that can help you do these activities quickly. With a few easy keyboard strokes, you can perform a variety of functions. This blog post will go through several Excel keyboard shortcuts that allow you to work more quickly and effectively in creating workbooks and formatting cells.

Instead of using the mouse to reach the toolbar, two or three keystrokes can be used to accomplish important activities. Isn’t that more convenient and time-saving?

The quick answer to the question of whether you MUST learn these shortcuts is no. However, it would be most helpful for you if remember a few of them. With consistent use of shortcuts, you should find that you will be able to recall the majority of the basic Excel shortcuts rather easily. Let’s have a look at the Excel shortcuts cheat sheet below:

Workbook Shortcut Keys

In this part, we will learn the fundamentals of using a workbook. We’ll go through how to make a new workbook, access an existing workbook, and save a spreadsheet so you don’t lose any data or calculations. Then, we’ll go through how to switch between different pages in a workbook.

Description Excel Shortcuts 
To create a new workbook Ctrl + N
To open an existing workbook Ctrl + O
To save a workbook/spreadsheet Ctrl + S
To close the current workbook Ctrl + W
To close Excel Ctrl + F4
To move to the next sheet Ctrl + PageDown
To move to the previous sheet Ctrl + PageUp
To go to the Data tab Alt + A
To go to the View tab Alt + W
To go the Formula tab Alt + M

These are the Excel shortcuts that can assist you in navigating your spreadsheet. Once the worksheet has been created, the next critical step is cell formatting.

Cell Formatting Shortcut Keys

In Excel, a cell contains all of the data that you are working with. Several shortcuts can be applied to a cell, including editing, aligning cell contents, adding a border to a cell, adding an outline to all selected cells, and much more.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of these Excel shortcuts:

Description Excel Shortcuts 
To edit a cell F2
To copy and paste cells Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
To italicize and make the font bold Ctrl + I, Ctrl + B
To centre align cell contents Alt + H + A + C
To fill colour Alt + H + H
To add a border Alt + H + B
To remove outline border Ctrl + Shift + _
To add an outline to the select cells Ctrl + Shift + &
To move to the next cell Tab
To move to the previous cell Shift + Tab
To select all the cells on the right Ctrl + Shift + Right arrow
To select all the cells on the left Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow
To select a column from selected cell to the end of the table Ctrl + Shift + Down Arrow
To select all the cells above the selected cell Ctrl + Shift + Up Arrow
To select all the cells below the selected cell Ctrl + Shift + Down Arrow

That’s it for now, we hope these shortcuts will help you increase your speed and agility when using Excel.

We’ll share another blog post in the near future with more Excel shortcuts to help you up your Excel game. In the meantime, practice makes perfect and constant use of these shortcuts will eventually make it an unconscious habit.

If you would like to learn more about Business Technology and how we can help you, please click through for more details on our team and our services or give us a call on 021 531 5180.

Doing business better. Together.

Share this post

More to explore