Excel Beginners

Keyboard Shortcuts: Step 4 To Mastering Spreadsheets

saving time by using your keyboard

About this Guide

This guide will be introducing the concept of shortcuts and quick commands which utilize only the keyboard to navigate and access specific functions within Excel.

There is always more to learn within Excel, and as such it is important to have a strong base of knowledge. This guide will cover the most basic of shortcuts and move its way up to a more advanced skillset. It will be formatted in such as way as to also be used as a reference guide that can be quickly printed and referred to during day-to-day use. Depending on your exposure to Excel, you will likely have come across some of these on your own, or maybe even started to research these types of tools (maybe that is even how you stumbled across this guide?). Here we will explain the core concepts of how shortcuts are constructed and how to find and learn new shortcuts not mentioned here.

While this guide is labelled as a tool for beginners, there is a strong chance even an experienced Excel user will find value in reading this! There are aspects of formula building which many users never experience simply due to the lack of a need for it. This does not make them any less important or valuable. I urge you to follow along with the guide by testing each shortcut yourself! If there are any prerequisites needed for a shortcut to work, it will be noted in that section.

Goodluck, and happy learning!

- Matthew Di Minno

What are shortcuts?

Simply put, shortcuts are a combination or set of keystrokes that are used to use Excel more quickly than you can with a mouse. They can be used to access specific tools, navigate a workbook, and replace things like selecting cells with your mouse. They can be anywhere from two to five keys long and can effectively remove the need for a mouse.

The three keys you need to know

There are three keys which are the basis of all shortcuts, the SHIFT key, the CTRL (or COMMAND key on a device running MacOS), and the ALT key. One or more of these keys are used to start every shortcut we will be looking at in this guide. Whenever we display a set of keystrokes that make up a shortcut, they will look something like as follows:

SHIFT   CTL   ALT

These buttons will be used to show the exact key combinations needed for each shortcut. This guide assumes that you have a full-sized keyboard (including a number pad), you may need to look up specific adjustments based on your personal model of computer/laptop/keyboard.