2D Canada Inc. presents: Free Microsoft Excel Tips and Tricks for the average & advanced users!
Easy Tricks:
Navigating through your spreadsheet with your keyboard. A few must-know ways of navigation involve using your keyboard for quick and easy scrolling, selection, and activations. The main principles are 1) scrolling and 2) selection. Most of the time, users need to select a range of either:
- single cell
- multiple adjacent cells
- entire row(s)
- entire column(s)
- non-adjacent cells
For each of the above selections, the user must first navigate to the start of the range.
Single cell selection is straight forward, as long as we can get to that cell. Without using the mouse, the main keys to remember are : CTRL, SHIFT, SPACE, and the obvious ARROW-KEYS. A combination of these keys will select any and all cells in a spreadsheet, without using the mouse.
CTRL+ARROW KEY. The control key is used to skip or jump to an 'end'. The End means the last non-blank cell in a range. If you are in the middle of a row of data (remember, a row is horizontal, a column is always vertical), that is to say not at the very end of the row of data, and you hold down the control key and press ARROW-RIGHT, you move to (select) the last non-blank cell in that row.
Try it: Type a series of numbers in a row starting in A1 using TAB after each entry. Type 1 > Tab > 3 >Tab > 6 > Tab > 7 > Tab > 23 > Enter. Now cell E1 should show 23.
Now select cell B1 (3). You are inside a range of data. Holding down CTRL, press ARROW KEY RIGHT. You will jump to the end of the range. If you now hold down CTRL and press ARROW KEY LEFT, you will jump (not back to B1, but) to A1, or the opposing end of the range. You can try this with a range of data in a columnar format too.
Notice what happens when you're already at the end (E1) and press CTRL + ARROW RIGHT again. You jump to the end of the next range, which is blanks, and hence, the last column of the file. You can press CTRL + LEFT to jump back to your active range.
